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Project Monarch, unfortunately, is many things to many people. At its most basic, it is one of the CIA‘s human experimentation projects, probably as part of MKULTRA. It has become something of a banner term for survivors and conspiracy theorists alike, which is to say that “Project Monarch” is sometimes used as a catch-all term for CIA experimentation in general (as, for that matter, is “MKULTRA”).

The severity of torture involved in a lot of the CIA’s projects has lent Project Monarch something of an air of lunacy. Survivors of any kind are often not believed when they talk about their abuse, and this may be particularly true of survivors whose abuse included their government, specific political figures, the creation of many people inside their bodies, elaborate programming, and extreme and horrific physical, sexual, and mental abuse. On top of that, ritual abuse survivors – including governmental ritual abuse – are often set up to sound like their memories can’t possibly be true, as we’ll see a little later on. Here, we’ll examine what Project Monarch may have been, some of the things that Project Monarch is said to have done, and exactly what evidence there is for all of that.

Disney, E.T., and the Wizard of Oz: What is involved?

The primary claims made about Project Monarch, from what I have read, are that it:

is a CIA-run mind-control experiment

involves intense programming and torture

creates an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder

Some secondary claims (i.e. those made with less frequency or which are in my opinion less relevant to the question of what people have experienced) include (but are not limited to) claiming that it:

includes “elite” government and Hollywood figures

is connected to Freemasonry, the Vatican, Satanists, and/or various other religious groups

is connected to Nazis or Nazism

Project Monarch: Content and Deliverance

Here we’ll look at some of the most common elements attributed to Project Monarch and other government abuse, and look for any evidence of their truth.

CIA Plans

“I am a survivor of mind control experiments performed under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. MK-ULTRA was established in 1953 to counter Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques and consisted of 149 subprojects contracted out to at least 80 institutions including hospitals and Universities. In 1977Director of Intelligence Stansfield Turner said the program was initiated because the Agency was confronted with ‘learning the state of the art of behavioral modification at a time when the U.S. Government was concerned about inexplicable behavior of persons behind the ‘Iron Curtain‘ and American prisoners of war who had been subjected to so called brainwashing.’”4 — Carol Rutz

As we’ve already seen, the MKULTRA subproject which attempted in part to create “multiple personality disorder” in children used (or at least the documents we have state their intention to use) nonconsensual electroshock, drugging, et cetera; all of these and more items discussed in this writeup tally perfectly with claims made by survivors.

Then there’s Ewen Cameron, who conducted CIA-financed psychiatric experiments where he “would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end, waking them daily only to administer violent electric shocks to the brain.”15 (There’s that pesky electric shock thing again!) According to author Anton Chaitkin, “Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centers of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive.”15

Cameron’s principal interest, at least according to a Wikipedia article on this subject, was in something called “psychic driving,” which they explain as “his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely.”23 This dovetailed perfectly with the work being undertaken by the CIA.

The CIA was eventually brought to trial by the husband of one of his victims, in Orlikow v. U.S.; one of the prosecuting attorneys, James Turner, later wrote a report of the trial. The extensive testimony describing Cameron’s work is graphic and horrifying.

Turner begins by sharing the documentation from the very beginning of Cameron’s experiments:

“Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, submitted a formal grant application to the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology” a CIA front operating at the Cornell University Medical School in New York City. That application proposed to extend brainwashing experimentation which Cameron described as follows:

“i. The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (depatterning).

“ii. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6 or 7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
“iii. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
“iv. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days.

“Cameron also proposed to test drugs such as ‘LSD 25 and other similar agents’ in ‘depatterning’ his patients and to experiment with new methods of ‘inactivating’ the patient during the repetition of verbal signals with other drugs including curare, a drug used in surgery to temporarily paralyze a patient’s involuntary muscles. “Cameron’s application for funds was dated January 21, 1957 and on February 26, 1957 Gottlieb and other CIA officials approved the application in a Memorandum that simply repeats, without reasoning or explanation, the application virtually in haec verba. Shortly thereafter, Gottlieb‘s deputy, Lashbrook, approved the first payment to Cameron.”Q

Ewen Cameron, who was already serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association (beginning in 1953 and serving until his death in 1967), and who had helped to found the Canadian Psychiatric AssociationT and served as president (concurrently with his CIA work, in 1958–9S), subsequently helped found and served as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association (1961).

Then there’s the case of “The Finders,” whose Washington, D.C. headquarters held — according to the U.S. Customs report on the matter — evidence of murder; child sexual abuse; photographs of naked children with adult “Finders;” high-tech money transfers; references to activities in Africa, the Bahamas, China, Germany, Hong Kong, London, Malaysia, Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam; “detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes (which) included the impregnation of female members of the… Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping;” and “a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets and participating in a ‘blood ritual’… the photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat’s `womb’ and the `baby goats’ inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children.”i

But wait, there’s more. They also found a warehouse which “contained a large library, two kitchens, a sauna, hot-tub, and a ‘video room.’ The video room seemed to be set up as an indoctrination center…. There were what appeared to be training areas for children and what appeared to be an altar set up in a residential area of the warehouse. Many jars of urine and feces were located in this area.” The report also noted “a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown.”i

According to the U.S. News and World Report as well as the Customs agents themselves, when the agents sought to continue their investigation they were told that the entire investigation had been reclassified as a CIA internal matter, and that:

“The (Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department) report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed (the police) not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.”5

The CIA claimed that the only connection between themselves and the Finders was that a firm which provided CIA officers with computer training “also employed several members of the Finders.” In his article on the subject, David McGowan states that

“It should probably be noted here that the firm that supplied the training didn’t just employ several members of the Finders but appears to have in fact been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the training of its officers to outside contractors. If a ‘private’ firm is utilized in such a capacity, it is in all such cases a front group of the CIA itself.”i

However, I do not have primary source documentation to illustrate this point, so I present it only as one possible aspect of the case.

Electroshock

One startlingly frequent element of government torture and ritual abuse is the use of electroshock in some capacity. As previously mentioned, we know that the CIA has conducted many experiments with electric shocks to (for example) find a way of erasing memories.V Electric shocks have also been used for a long time in aversion therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and are frequently found even in non-governmental and non-ritual abuse survivors’ stories.

Mark Phillips says about Project Monarch that

“There are ‘strap on’ head and foot devices that could deliver a mind altering shock of an exact duration according to the subject’s brainwave activity and/or heartbeat. Other portable hand held stun gun type devices can deliver shock up to 200,000 volts for a variety of reasons, but primarily for instant control of the conscious mind.”2

In a more general form, this is a frequently heard claim; several people speaking to the 1995 Senate Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments made statements such as

“Between 1972 and 1976, (Dr. Green) and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, sub-project, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation and mind-control experiments, which I have submitted in your written documentation. I was caught twice, and Dr. Green ruthlessly used electric shock, drugs, spun me on a table, put shots in my stomach and my back, dislocated my joints, and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal.” (Christine DeNicola) “Between the years of 1957 and 1974, I became a pawn in the government’s game, whose ultimate goal was mind-control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life, and the only explanations given to me were that ‘the end justifies the means,’ and ‘I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism.’” (C. Mullen)

A cursory googling of “stun gun” and “200,000 volts” turns up stun guns that go this high and higher (running on only one or two 9-volt batteries) at sites like pepperspraymace.com.12

“The stun gun is designed to key into the nervous system. It dumps its energy into the muscles at a high pulse frequency that makes the muscles work very rapidly, but not very efficiently. This rapid work cycle depletes blood sugar by converting it into lactic acid all in just seconds. The resulting energy loss makes it difficult to move and function. At the same time, the tiny neurological impulses that travel throughout the body to direct muscle movement are interrupted. This causes disorientation and loss of balance, leaving the attacker in a passive and confused condition for several minutes. Still there is no significant effect on the heart and other organs.”As a general rule, a 1/4 second contact will repel and startle the attacker, giving intense pain and muscle contraction. One to two seconds will cause intense pain, muscle spasms and a dazed mental state, this may drop the attacker to the ground. Over three seconds will cause intense pain, loss of balance, loss of muscle control, mental confusion and disorientation. Generally any charge over three seconds will cause the aggressor to fall to the ground. The aggressor will be unable to recover for several minutes and effects may last for up to fifteen minutes.”13

Creation of “Multiple Personalities” and/or “Sleeper Agents”

“If you think creating Multiple Personality Disorder is too bizarre and strange to be real … again, you just have to look at the LSD, the brain implant research, some of the sensory deprivation, the Ames Leaf Room, using millions and millions of dollars to pay psychics to spy on other countries while lying on tables in the USA. Once you have that context, then creating Multiple Personality Disorder is kind of small …the very fact that you can create it artificially, to me indicates that it can be created artificially or on purpose, and also that it’s likely to happen naturally.”
– Dr. Colin Ross, interviewed by Ryerson CKLN Radio producer Wayne Morris in Toronto.6

As someone who is multiple myself, I don’t like to speak to the multiple issue. I’ll only note here that the vast majority of the psychiatric community is absolutely convinced that “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder” only occurs in situations of abuse, and some of them insist it must be extremely violent and particularly traumatic abuse.

Whether the government was able to successfully program people, either within multiple systems or otherwise, who could act as assassins, drug mules, et cetera, is another question. Let’s let the CIA themselves address that one. Most sources refer to this simply as a 1951 memo; one gives the “approximate date” as “January 1, 1952.” It is labeled Bluebird. However, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke overlapped, in some cases both being engaged in the same activity, and both were engaged in studying various methods and effects relating to hypnotismC; Project MKULTRA, of which I believe Monarch was a part, began as an offshoot of Project Artichoke. Therefore, I believe that the following illustrate at least some of what the CIA was trying to do and had achieved around the beginning of Project MKULTRA; we already know it was their stated intention to develop these findings further in MKULTRA/Monarch.

“1. Can we “condition” by post-H (hypnotic) suggestion agency employees (or persons of interest to this agency) to prevent them from giving information to any unauthorized source or for committing any act on behalf of a foreign or domestic enemy?”2. Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit? (Long range).

“3. Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?

“4. Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? (Short, immediate activity)

“5. Can we by SI and H techniques force a subject (unwilling or otherwise) to travel long distances, commit specified acts and return to us or bring documents or materials? Can a person acting under post-H control successfully travel long distances?

“6. Can we use SI and H to combat fatigue, produce extreme mental effort?

“7. Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

“8. Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?

“9. Can we design tests to determine whether or not an enemy agent has been conditioned by SI and H or any other method?

“10. Can we detect SI and H by use of SI and H (regression)?

“11. Can we make a ‘conditioned’ subject reveal by SI and H specifically how they were conditioned (drugs, torture, fatigue, hostage pressure, techniques)?

“12. Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?

“13. How long can we sustain a post-H suggestion-unaided-with reinforcement?

“14. What would be fastest way to induce SI and H conditions – with drugs – or without any mechanical aids?

“15. Can we devise a standard simple relatively fast technique for inducing SI and H conditions that can be used by untrained agents (with or without drugs)?

“16. Is it possible to find a gas that can be used to gain SI control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless: one shot, etc.?

“17. What are full details on ‘sleep-inducing machine’?

“18. How can sodium A or P or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, aspirin tablets, common medicines, coke, tooth paste?

“19. How effective can the ‘carotid artery technique’ be made? Can it be used while subject is unconscious? Is it faster than other techniques?

“20. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans? Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?

“21. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans?

“Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?”C and W

On January 7th, 1953, they reported that:

“These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H (hypnotic) controlled state by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words, and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”W

And in 1954:

“Miss (whited out) was instructed (having expressed a fear of firearms) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss (whited out) (now in a deep hypnotic sleep). Failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss (whited out). She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill’ (whited out) for failing to awaken. Miss (whited out) carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at (whited out) and then proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened. Miss (whited out) expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”W

Nazis

The claim of Nazi involvement in these atrocities usually seems to come not from survivors but from outsiders researching the issue and trying to explain how it all came about. For example, Ron Patton has written that

“After WWII, the U.S. Department of Defense secretly imported many of the top German Nazi and Italian Fascist scientists and spies into the United States via South America and the Vatican. The code name for this operation was Project PAPERCLIP. One of the more prominent finds for the U.S. was German General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler‘s Chief of Intelligence against Russia. Upon arriving in Washington D.C. in 1945, Gehlen met extensively with President Truman, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Allen Dulles, who would later become the stalwart head of the CIA. The objective of their brain-storming sessions was to reorganize the nominal American intelligence operation, transforming it into a highly-efficient covert organization. The culmination of their efforts produced the Central Intelligence Group in 1946, renamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947.”16

The clearest connection with the Nazis is through the above-mentioned Project Paperclip. As riverrunhas written,

“….The Nazis had done some very “good” work in rocket science and psychological, chemical, and biological warfare. It seemed a pity to let that work disappear in a puff of petrol smoke in a ditch at Hitler’s Wedding Reception. “As early as the invasion of Normandy, in June of 1944, at least ten thousand American intelligence officers were charged with seizing Nazi experts in munitions, rocketry, and psychological, biological and chemical research. For good measure, French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis were included as well.
…. “(This project was) like giving Osama Bin Laden‘s experts in suicide bombing an apartment in Alexandria and a Visa Card, so long as they promised to only suicide bomb for our side.”

So, however “crazy conspiracy theorist” it may sound to link these activities to the Nazis, they do seem to follow a clear line back to Nazi medical experiments and related research.

Disney

My first exposure to the idea of Project Monarch came when I met people who had been ritually abused and were trying to explore and defuse their own programming. I found a lot of information describing supposed Project Monarch programming — like Alice in Wonderland, color, gem, and spin programming — which nevertheless is also found in a lot of people who were ritually abused outside of the government’s grasp.

The two main kinds of programming can be described as operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the classic Pavlovian response. A dog salivates when it hears the can opener; a college student jumps at hearing the bell for recess; an abuse survivor has body memories of being unable to breathe at the sight of the exact shade of blue of the blanket in the bed where they were almost smothered. It’s a disparate response which comes from extremely intense or repeated stimuli. As Tem42observes, it is a stimulus-stimulus connection instead of stimulus-response: they are all reacting as if both stimuli were present (the can opener and food, the bell and recess, the bedclothes and the smothering) instead of only the one which is triggering them.

Operant conditioning is a connection between some stimulus and its normal response. We flip a switch and discover that the overhead light turns on, and soon operant conditioning makes this an automatic motion for us. It is what happens when a rat learns what button to press to get fed, or when we make our way through a new piece of software for the first time and watch for consistent responses from it to find out what different commands and buttons do.

Most of the stereotypical programming within ritual abuse is classical conditioning. Using triggers that have seemingly irrelevant effects is a handy way for people to mask the programming and hide what they are doing. Who would believe that an (apparent?) assassin like Sirhan Sirhan was externally controlled and put into a dissociativefugue state by the Smurfs theme song? (This is an entirely fictional example. I believe Sirhan Sirhan was too early for at least the American Smurfs.)

Programming like this can be very involved. One book, movie, or fairytale can be exploited for a huge number of triggers and programs. Both the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are very often used for this, possibly because of their magical and sometimes surreal imagery and patterns as well as their prevalence in mainstream United States culture. But what does that mean?

Imagine you have a friend who you know has been struggling to deal with ritual abuse, to figure out what happened to her and what is going on. Maybe you’re good friends; maybe you trust each other fairly deeply. You might happen to know a particular number or pattern that she finds very triggering; maybe one afternoon you are talking, and you happen to say that triggering number. Maybe she asked you to try something like that, to see what would happen. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you do anyway.

She goes away, markedly. Someone else comes out; they seem little and scared. Maybe you’re used to this; you know she’s multiple, you’ve gotten to know different people in there. That’s okay. You ask her what her name is; it’s Alice17. You find out there are a lot more Alices in there; you realize she thinks you’re going to rape her, that that’s what she’s been taught that she’s there for. Maybe later you discover that 17 is important to them too, because it’s a prime factor of the number that was the big trigger. Whatever. You figure it’s probably because of Alice in Wonderland, because you know your friend is totally obsessed with that book, and any movies or anything else made from it. Maybe you’d heard about Alice in Wonderland programming somewhere already.

Alice freaks out and takes off, maybe even because you’re not doing anything to her. The unknown is hard. Someone else comes around, some sly pain-in-the-ass you’ve met before. They were hanging out there already, keeping an eye on things. They greet you and ask if you’re the White Rabbit. You’re pretty sure you’re not, whatever it is. Later you find out that that’s usually a programmer. They tell you a lot of stuff anyway, and you try to figure out how much of it is to mess with other people in there… things like getting them between two mirrors so they go “through the looking-glass,” or like little snatches of Lewis Carroll poems that do things, but not what they do. Maybe later you learn more, like that “through the looking-glass” means that someone else who was programmed and forced to be a child prostitute gets stuck out for a really long time, or that the poem they gave you makes whoever’s out lose everything in their short-term memory.

Maybe all of this seems totally fantastical to you; unfortunately, the little scene above was drawn straight from personal experience.

Some of the benefits of this kind of programming are:

The child is likely to encounter the movie, or references to it, in many innocent everyday situations, which reinforces the programming at no cost to the abuser. Nursery rhymes are also commonly used, presumably for similar reasons.

As we’ll see a little later on, combining extreme abuse with ludicrously different elements (such as alien abduction or Disney movies) is an easy way for the abusers to seriously damage their victims’ credibility.

It cuts down on the work for the programmer: It’s easy to remember elements that everyone knows from popular books or movies, and nobody has to create triggers from scratch. (Although when it comes to many cases of non-governmental ritual abuse, abusers are simply acting out their own abuse on others rather than embarking on some grand new scheme.)

This is not a claim specifically made about the CIA’s projects in most cases, although it is sometimes connected to abuse by the military. Other forms of programming, though, are rampant in the experiences of Project Monarch survivors.

There are still confusing aspects of these accounts, like the aforementioned and possibly drug-induced experience of seeing Bush reveal his true, humanoid lizard form — which I admit I would really like to believe! Let’s ask again….

Was There Something Specifically Called Project Monarch?

Phillips and O’Brien aren’t the only sources of these claims, obviously. This question brings us back to the beginning of this piece. That is, it can’t be asked sensibly without being split into the original two questions: Was there something specifically called Project Monarch? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

A Moment For the Skeptical

It certainly appears to be true that Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien have surrounded Project Monarch with a cloud of confusing and sometimes entertainingly odd information. Their explanations of what is involved seem almost designed to make it all seem ludicrous — and indeed, this is one of the tools used in ritual abuse and mind control-related abuse. There appear to me to be two real questions raised by such writings: Does a specific “Project Monarch” exist? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

In previous readings on Project Monarch, I had been fortunate enough not to come across O’Brien or Phillips’ controversial writings, nor even Martin Cannon’s article on the subject. In doing research for this writeup, I was especially careful not to use them as resources.

Evidence For Project Monarch As Such

Since Projects MKULTRA and Artichoke, among others, have been documented through information released by the CIA itselfA,B, we do know that the CIA has done extensive experimentation on civilians around the issues of programming, mind control, memory retention and erasure, the effects of various drugs, et cetera. I set out to look for information about Project Monarch in relation to these confirmed projects.

I did find a few sites that assert they have printed evidence that Project Monarch existed.y,z The basic information they give seems to be that MKULTRA was a large enterprise with 149 stated sub-projects – which can be confirmed by reading the information released by the CIAA,B – and that Project Monarch was a specific sub-project.

The first evidence I found was a listserv post which claimed that Project Monarch was Subproject 84 of MKULTRAz, but without having the released documents to look at, I can’t tell whether this is because it is called that in the text, or because of the content of Subproject 84. The subprojects of MKULTRA have titles ranging from “Marijuana Research” to “Unwitting Drug Tests at University of Maryland,” “Rapid Hypnotic Induction,” and “Optics mixed with Biological Warfare–Cuba Chapter.”A

The declassified folder of documents on Subproject 84 is apparently labeled “Hypnosis Work,” according to the list of documents which John Marks received (under the Freedom of Information Act) for his research on the book “The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”A This seems inconclusive to me; while the general description of the work involved in Project Monarch could fit under “Hypnosis Work,” it could just as easily fit under many of the other MKULTRA subprojects listed there.

There is also an article by Ron Patton wherein he states that

“The most incriminating statement to date made by a government official as to the possible existence of Project MONARCH was extracted by (historian and investigative reporter) Anton Chaitkin, a writer for the publication, The New Federalist. When former CIA Director William Colby was asked directly, “What about monarch?” he replied angrily and ambiguously, “We stopped that between the late 1960‘s and the early 1970‘s.”16

I don’t consider that to be very strong evidence, because I have not been able to find any primary source documents quoting William Colby, even the original Chaitkin article. It is interesting, if true, but hardly conclusive. After writing and posting this piece, however, I was approached by a casual acquaintance who I had forgotten was a ritual abuse survivor. I found out that she had the kind of programming frequently associated with Project Monarch, and that she had an online journal in which she had tried to replicate a form she had once seen with her name on it — a form which had been headed, “MONARCH/MKULTRA.”y I hope to get her permission to interview her for this writeup soon.

The Spin Doctors: Why Does It All Seem So Strange?

I know people personally, offline, who remember being ritually abused by the government in some of the ways described above, who have seen many of their experiences reflected in the writings of apparent Project Monarch survivors like Brice Taylor. As Timeshredder points out, Taylor’s accounts of Project Monarch appeared after O’Brien’s, although given the nature of linear time I feel bound to point out that someone’s accounts have to come first.

Martin Cannon, in his article on Phillips and O’Brien which forms the basis for the writeup above, addresses the issue of “which came first”:

“Just to make matters pluperfectly surreal: Mark Phillips has privately admitted to at least one researcher that he (Phillips) concocted the name ‘Project Monarch,’ just to see who would pick it up. At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited – which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a ‘Project Monarch’ well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario.”20

Cannon himself also states therein that “Little about the basic Monarch theory struck me as technically implausible – indeed, this putative project seems, in many ways, the logical extension of MKULTRA.” His conjecture seems to be that much of the information Mark Phillips has helped release on the subject was designed to cloud the issue. Combining survivor testimony with false information is one of the main tools used to cover up ritual abuse. For example, Pamela Hudson, LCSW and author of “Ritual Child Abuse: Discovery, Diagnosis and Treatment,”

“said it became apparent to her that perpetrators actually set up stagings for incidents of abuse. Perpetrators dressed as space aliens or cartoon characters, so that later when a child was questioned by a therapist, lawyer, or police officer, the child might say that the abuser was an alien or Mickey Mouse – and the whole story might be dismissed as fabrication.”14

Along the same lines, Martin Cannon (author of the article debunking Cathy O’Brien’s story) writes elsewhere, on the subject of alien abductions, that:

“I posit that the abductees HAVE been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy — or, more precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: The kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction is real. But the little grey men from Zeti Reticuli are NOT real; they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather, they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.”11

Kathleen Sullivan, among others, has spoken eloquently on the way this dynamic plays out and on some of the hidden repercussions for survivors who go public with their stories:

“…I am quite amused that Icke, who blatantly reinforces ‘lizard men’ screen memories in high-level MC survivors’ minds to discredit them to the public and in court, is suddenly helping to expose Mark. I’ve seen this behavior before. In this instance, former business partners (Gunderson, Icke, Phillips and Bowart/Kirby) suddenly turn on one of their own, AFTER it is obvious that their partner’s (sic) are not going to behave and be quiet about his activities. The others had years of warning from the victims, to step out and denounce him.”The way I see it, Mark became too much of a liability to them. This behavior on the part of Mark’s friends/partners is not dissimilar to when children go to the police and media about a group of criminal cultists who have been ritually traumatizing and raping them for years. The cultists throw out one of their people for the police and legal system to make an open fuss over and slap in prison, and the others continue doing their dirty work just like before, never being legally named.

“In the MC survivor community, I’ve seen this tactic taken one step further. ‘Good guy bad guy’ routine. By helping to publicly out their partner, after having been tight with him for many years, it makes other perps look like they are heros. (sic) Then the the (sic) outed perp’s victims (eg: Brice) go running to THEM for protection and information. And the survivor’s external control and victimization continues….”22

While it is difficult to know how to distinguish truth from programmed smokescreen in accounts like Cathy O’Brien’s, it is possible to look at the events that we can verify and begin to build a sort of mental filter for fact and torturous fiction. For example, one self-described “alleged survivor,” Carol Rutz, tells a story very like Cathy’s in structure and timeline, but much less lurid in problematic detail. She describes her

“intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of starting at the tender age of four. Through a series of FOIA‘s to various departments of the government, I have amassed an incredible amount of material that validates my personal experiences. I have also found pictures of machines that were used in these experiments that match drawings I made during my healing process,”

all of which she also provides to her readers.1,4Now, I’m not saying Cathy O’Brien is lying or that nothing she describes has happened to her, only that she has been manipulatively exploited to make all of these issues seem more improbable than they really are. We can still learn a lot from what she has to say. As John Gentry points out,

“In the balance, Phillips and O’Brien have helped literally tens of thousands awaken to the ongoing designs of the New World Order, one world government bunch; and pointed repeatedly and poignantly to their (NWO) Achilles’ Heel: their treatment of women and children.”21

The programming, torture, child sexual abuse, and the rest of what is described by people like Cathy Phillips, are a form of ritual abuse. In these cases, it is sometimes called government ritual abuse or government-sponsored ritual abuse.

As we can see from Timeshredder’s writeup above, ritual abuse is highly controversial. Accounts of ritual abuse are frequently characterized by elements that seem too extreme to have happened to anyone, or even laughable — like seeing the President turn into a giant lizard.

Nevertheless, there is a wealth of government-released evidence for the former, and a variety of possible explanations for the latter, especially given that a great deal of the government’s admitted experimentation involved heavy hallucinogens and other drugs administered without the survivor’s knowledge or permission.

Beyond Project Monarch: A few other cases of governmental ritual abuse

Of course, it’s easy to glibly say that there are explanations and evidence for these things. It’s harder to find them. For example, while there are Freedom of Information Act-released documents on a lot of the horrific acts committed by the CIA under MKULTRA, they represent only a small portion of the original documentation. According to Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in his prepared statement to the 1977U.S. Senate Committee HearingsD,

Most of what was known about the Agency’s involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General’s office in 1963…. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported.

Searching for clear information on government ritual abuse often requires sifting through a lot of conflicting and confusing information from both sides. A lot of writing on this subject, whether it is denying or supporting these claims, reads like the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap — “CIA, 1939, after Nazis & Commies united, proposed spacebombs that destroy all, unless we finally teach the Moral ABC’s the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus to unite in All-One-God-Faith. Illuminati-Masons-Nazis-White House! Government propaganda destroys! Killing machine secrets for all! ‘WE’RE ALL ONE OR NONE!’”

With enough effort and knowledge, though, clear information can be found, even on….

The Major Claims

While many of the claims made about Project Monarch seem extreme and sometimes even impossible to the casual observer, they often fit in easily with the work that the CIA has admitted to doing in other projects and in MKULTRA itself. The CIA has already admitted to extreme, extensive experiments in mind control, programming, and torture. For example:

According to Dr. Colin Ross, who wrote a long and heavily researched and well-footnoted book about all the declassified information on MKULTRA7, “The deliberate creation of multiple personality in children is an explicitly stated plan in the MKULTRA Subproject Proposal submitted for funding on May 30, 1961.”E (This was Subproject 136, which according to the CIA involved electric shocks and “hypnotically induced anxieties,” among other forms of trauma.) Other MKULTRA experiments they list involved testing mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents on human subjects, biological weapons testing, physical pain endurance and brainwashing techniques.

Files on MKULTRA Subproject 49, labeled “MKULTRA: George White and Federal Bureau of Narcotics” when released under the Freedom of Information Act, included “Experiment 7 – Recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.”1 This is programming: specifically-chosen signals that bring up “acquired information.” (Usually that means orders to do something; sometimes it means fear or traumatic memories.)”Hypnosis” in the CIA files seems to have been a broad category: their proposal for Subproject 136 says in part that “In other cases drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociative states, from the abaissment de niveau mental to multiple personality in so-called mediums, and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.”

CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s testimony to the 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRAd included, in very small part, the following information:

“The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).”D

MKULTRA and other CIA projects also involved nonconsensual radiation testing on unsuspecting citizens, often in conjunction with other government departments.

“…the DOE has disclosed information about the federal government’s human radiation experiments after World War II. These experiments primarily took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, but some have occurred as recently as the 1980s. Eleven thousand documents reviewed disclosed that in at least forty-eight experiments humans were given radioactive isotopes, generally without their consent, to determine the effects of radiation on the body. The DOE has made thousands of documents once kept secret available for public use. Of primary interest to the public was O’Leary’s announcement in December 1993 that documents related to human radiation experiments and exposure to barium and strontium at government weapons laboratories across the country were to be released.”10

(This is according to a biography of Hazel O’Leary, the first woman to become U.S. Secretary of Energy, which cites the Nashville Tennessean for this information10. More information about these experiments can be found on the Department of Energy’s own websiteF.)

Ross also states that “Although MKULTRA has received the most public attention of any of the CIA and military mind control programs, most of its Subprojects were relatively benign compared to experiments carried out in PROJECT OFTEN and MKNAOMI.” MKNAOMI was a successor of MKULTRA, focusing on biological and chemical weapons. The CIA and DIA collaborated on creating and testing these agents. According to the Military Review in November 1970, the United States begins to research “ethnic weapons,”H intended to “target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.”7 MKNAOMI also includes a military project seeking to develop cancer-causing viruses. According to the Congressional Record of 1969, the Department of Defense requested funding “to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired,”8,9 and against which natural immunological processes and medicines would not work. Much of this research takes place at Fort Detrick’s Center for Biological Warfare Research. Under President Nixon, the center is converted to become the National Cancer Institute‘s Frederick Cancer Research and Development, while this project is going on (in 1971)G. In 1979 scientist Robert Gallo of NCI finally isolates a virus to which no natural immunity exists, naming it HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus)G. Later, HTLV-III is renamed HIV.8

But I digress.

Any one of these examples should satisfy anyone seeking a good “conspiracy theory,” and I have limited myself here to only a few of the statements and examples which I can back up solely through United States government documentation. More information on the kind of behavior that constitutes ritual abuse can be found at that node.

So, looking at our general claims:

Have the CIA run mind-control experiments? According to them, yes.

Have at least some of these experiments involve intense programming and torture? Again, according to them, yes.

Have any of these experiments attempted to create an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder? Once again, yes, and in so many words.

Conclusion

Even if Mark Phillips had invented the name “Project Monarch” himself, I believe that would mean nothing about whether this kind of abuse took place. We know that there have been manydifferentprojectsintheCIAalone which perpetrated similar forms of abuse. It is possible that there was not a specific “Project Monarch,” but that most of what is described by “Project Monarch survivors” did happen to them. It is hardly the only government project which is supposed to have extensively abused people. In fact, many of the people I know personally who have experienced similar abuse to that of Taylor and O’Brien do not identify as having been part of Project Monarch or any other specific government project.

When I began writing this piece, that was all that I thought had happened: that even if there was no “Project Monarch,” it would simply have meant that someone gave these experiences a handy label; and that in the absence of more extensive information about government abuse, a lot of people assumed that they were a part of “Project Monarch” because it was the name most often associated with the kind of experiences that they knew they had. Now I believe that Monarch is probably an official name for some part of MKULTRA. For me, the turning point came from talking to people who had been abused in these ways, who had seen CIA paperwork with the word “Monarch” right on it. Your mileage may vary.

However, I believe that the core issue here is that these survivors’ experiences are thrown out, even laughed at, while this kind of abuse goes on all around us. I hope that the extensive research I have done here can help spread awareness of at least one tiny part of this abuse. Thanks for reading.

Works Cited:

Please note that some of these sites are wildly biased in one direction or another, and that in all cases the reference is to specific documents reprinted on the site, not to any commentary that the site’s owners may have included.

Documentation:
(Primary source documentation, mostly from United States government agencies; I highly recommend reading any and all of these documents.)

Project Monarch, unfortunately, is many things to many people. At its most basic, it is one of the CIA‘s human experimentation projects, probably as part of MKULTRA. It has become something of a banner term for survivors and conspiracy theorists alike, which is to say that “Project Monarch” is sometimes used as a catch-all term for CIA experimentation in general (as, for that matter, is “MKULTRA”).

The severity of torture involved in a lot of the CIA’s projects has lent Project Monarch something of an air of lunacy. Survivors of any kind are often not believed when they talk about their abuse, and this may be particularly true of survivors whose abuse included their government, specific political figures, the creation of many people inside their bodies, elaborate programming, and extreme and horrific physical, sexual, and mental abuse. On top of that, ritual abuse survivors – including governmental ritual abuse – are often set up to sound like their memories can’t possibly be true, as we’ll see a little later on. Here, we’ll examine what Project Monarch may have been, some of the things that Project Monarch is said to have done, and exactly what evidence there is for all of that.

Disney, E.T., and the Wizard of Oz: What is involved?

The primary claims made about Project Monarch, from what I have read, are that it:

is a CIA-run mind-control experiment

involves intense programming and torture

creates an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder

Some secondary claims (i.e. those made with less frequency or which are in my opinion less relevant to the question of what people have experienced) include (but are not limited to) claiming that it:

includes “elite” government and Hollywood figures

is connected to Freemasonry, the Vatican, Satanists, and/or various other religious groups

is connected to Nazis or Nazism

Project Monarch: Content and Deliverance

Here we’ll look at some of the most common elements attributed to Project Monarch and other government abuse, and look for any evidence of their truth.

CIA Plans

“I am a survivor of mind control experiments performed under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. MK-ULTRA was established in 1953 to counter Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques and consisted of 149 subprojects contracted out to at least 80 institutions including hospitals and Universities. In 1977Director of Intelligence Stansfield Turner said the program was initiated because the Agency was confronted with ‘learning the state of the art of behavioral modification at a time when the U.S. Government was concerned about inexplicable behavior of persons behind the ‘Iron Curtain‘ and American prisoners of war who had been subjected to so called brainwashing.’”4 — Carol Rutz

As we’ve already seen, the MKULTRA subproject which attempted in part to create “multiple personality disorder” in children used (or at least the documents we have state their intention to use) nonconsensual electroshock, drugging, et cetera; all of these and more items discussed in this writeup tally perfectly with claims made by survivors.

Then there’s Ewen Cameron, who conducted CIA-financed psychiatric experiments where he “would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end, waking them daily only to administer violent electric shocks to the brain.”15 (There’s that pesky electric shock thing again!) According to author Anton Chaitkin, “Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centers of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive.”15

Cameron’s principal interest, at least according to a Wikipedia article on this subject, was in something called “psychic driving,” which they explain as “his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely.”23 This dovetailed perfectly with the work being undertaken by the CIA.

The CIA was eventually brought to trial by the husband of one of his victims, in Orlikow v. U.S.; one of the prosecuting attorneys, James Turner, later wrote a report of the trial. The extensive testimony describing Cameron’s work is graphic and horrifying.

Turner begins by sharing the documentation from the very beginning of Cameron’s experiments:

“Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, submitted a formal grant application to the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology” a CIA front operating at the Cornell University Medical School in New York City. That application proposed to extend brainwashing experimentation which Cameron described as follows:

“i. The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (depatterning).

“ii. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6 or 7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
“iii. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
“iv. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days.

“Cameron also proposed to test drugs such as ‘LSD 25 and other similar agents’ in ‘depatterning’ his patients and to experiment with new methods of ‘inactivating’ the patient during the repetition of verbal signals with other drugs including curare, a drug used in surgery to temporarily paralyze a patient’s involuntary muscles. “Cameron’s application for funds was dated January 21, 1957 and on February 26, 1957 Gottlieb and other CIA officials approved the application in a Memorandum that simply repeats, without reasoning or explanation, the application virtually in haec verba. Shortly thereafter, Gottlieb‘s deputy, Lashbrook, approved the first payment to Cameron.”Q

Ewen Cameron, who was already serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association (beginning in 1953 and serving until his death in 1967), and who had helped to found the Canadian Psychiatric AssociationT and served as president (concurrently with his CIA work, in 1958–9S), subsequently helped found and served as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association (1961).

Then there’s the case of “The Finders,” whose Washington, D.C. headquarters held — according to the U.S. Customs report on the matter — evidence of murder; child sexual abuse; photographs of naked children with adult “Finders;” high-tech money transfers; references to activities in Africa, the Bahamas, China, Germany, Hong Kong, London, Malaysia, Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam; “detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes (which) included the impregnation of female members of the… Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping;” and “a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets and participating in a ‘blood ritual’… the photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat’s `womb’ and the `baby goats’ inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children.”i

But wait, there’s more. They also found a warehouse which “contained a large library, two kitchens, a sauna, hot-tub, and a ‘video room.’ The video room seemed to be set up as an indoctrination center…. There were what appeared to be training areas for children and what appeared to be an altar set up in a residential area of the warehouse. Many jars of urine and feces were located in this area.” The report also noted “a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown.”i

According to the U.S. News and World Report as well as the Customs agents themselves, when the agents sought to continue their investigation they were told that the entire investigation had been reclassified as a CIA internal matter, and that:

“The (Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department) report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed (the police) not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.”5

The CIA claimed that the only connection between themselves and the Finders was that a firm which provided CIA officers with computer training “also employed several members of the Finders.” In his article on the subject, David McGowan states that

“It should probably be noted here that the firm that supplied the training didn’t just employ several members of the Finders but appears to have in fact been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the training of its officers to outside contractors. If a ‘private’ firm is utilized in such a capacity, it is in all such cases a front group of the CIA itself.”i

However, I do not have primary source documentation to illustrate this point, so I present it only as one possible aspect of the case.

Electroshock

One startlingly frequent element of government torture and ritual abuse is the use of electroshock in some capacity. As previously mentioned, we know that the CIA has conducted many experiments with electric shocks to (for example) find a way of erasing memories.V Electric shocks have also been used for a long time in aversion therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and are frequently found even in non-governmental and non-ritual abuse survivors’ stories.

Mark Phillips says about Project Monarch that

“There are ‘strap on’ head and foot devices that could deliver a mind altering shock of an exact duration according to the subject’s brainwave activity and/or heartbeat. Other portable hand held stun gun type devices can deliver shock up to 200,000 volts for a variety of reasons, but primarily for instant control of the conscious mind.”2

In a more general form, this is a frequently heard claim; several people speaking to the 1995 Senate Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments made statements such as

“Between 1972 and 1976, (Dr. Green) and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, sub-project, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation and mind-control experiments, which I have submitted in your written documentation. I was caught twice, and Dr. Green ruthlessly used electric shock, drugs, spun me on a table, put shots in my stomach and my back, dislocated my joints, and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal.” (Christine DeNicola) “Between the years of 1957 and 1974, I became a pawn in the government’s game, whose ultimate goal was mind-control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life, and the only explanations given to me were that ‘the end justifies the means,’ and ‘I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism.’” (C. Mullen)

A cursory googling of “stun gun” and “200,000 volts” turns up stun guns that go this high and higher (running on only one or two 9-volt batteries) at sites like pepperspraymace.com.12

“The stun gun is designed to key into the nervous system. It dumps its energy into the muscles at a high pulse frequency that makes the muscles work very rapidly, but not very efficiently. This rapid work cycle depletes blood sugar by converting it into lactic acid all in just seconds. The resulting energy loss makes it difficult to move and function. At the same time, the tiny neurological impulses that travel throughout the body to direct muscle movement are interrupted. This causes disorientation and loss of balance, leaving the attacker in a passive and confused condition for several minutes. Still there is no significant effect on the heart and other organs.”As a general rule, a 1/4 second contact will repel and startle the attacker, giving intense pain and muscle contraction. One to two seconds will cause intense pain, muscle spasms and a dazed mental state, this may drop the attacker to the ground. Over three seconds will cause intense pain, loss of balance, loss of muscle control, mental confusion and disorientation. Generally any charge over three seconds will cause the aggressor to fall to the ground. The aggressor will be unable to recover for several minutes and effects may last for up to fifteen minutes.”13

Creation of “Multiple Personalities” and/or “Sleeper Agents”

“If you think creating Multiple Personality Disorder is too bizarre and strange to be real … again, you just have to look at the LSD, the brain implant research, some of the sensory deprivation, the Ames Leaf Room, using millions and millions of dollars to pay psychics to spy on other countries while lying on tables in the USA. Once you have that context, then creating Multiple Personality Disorder is kind of small …the very fact that you can create it artificially, to me indicates that it can be created artificially or on purpose, and also that it’s likely to happen naturally.”
– Dr. Colin Ross, interviewed by Ryerson CKLN Radio producer Wayne Morris in Toronto.6

As someone who is multiple myself, I don’t like to speak to the multiple issue. I’ll only note here that the vast majority of the psychiatric community is absolutely convinced that “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder” only occurs in situations of abuse, and some of them insist it must be extremely violent and particularly traumatic abuse.

Whether the government was able to successfully program people, either within multiple systems or otherwise, who could act as assassins, drug mules, et cetera, is another question. Let’s let the CIA themselves address that one. Most sources refer to this simply as a 1951 memo; one gives the “approximate date” as “January 1, 1952.” It is labeled Bluebird. However, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke overlapped, in some cases both being engaged in the same activity, and both were engaged in studying various methods and effects relating to hypnotismC; Project MKULTRA, of which I believe Monarch was a part, began as an offshoot of Project Artichoke. Therefore, I believe that the following illustrate at least some of what the CIA was trying to do and had achieved around the beginning of Project MKULTRA; we already know it was their stated intention to develop these findings further in MKULTRA/Monarch.

“1. Can we “condition” by post-H (hypnotic) suggestion agency employees (or persons of interest to this agency) to prevent them from giving information to any unauthorized source or for committing any act on behalf of a foreign or domestic enemy?”2. Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit? (Long range).

“3. Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?

“4. Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? (Short, immediate activity)

“5. Can we by SI and H techniques force a subject (unwilling or otherwise) to travel long distances, commit specified acts and return to us or bring documents or materials? Can a person acting under post-H control successfully travel long distances?

“6. Can we use SI and H to combat fatigue, produce extreme mental effort?

“7. Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

“8. Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?

“9. Can we design tests to determine whether or not an enemy agent has been conditioned by SI and H or any other method?

“10. Can we detect SI and H by use of SI and H (regression)?

“11. Can we make a ‘conditioned’ subject reveal by SI and H specifically how they were conditioned (drugs, torture, fatigue, hostage pressure, techniques)?

“12. Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?

“13. How long can we sustain a post-H suggestion-unaided-with reinforcement?

“14. What would be fastest way to induce SI and H conditions – with drugs – or without any mechanical aids?

“15. Can we devise a standard simple relatively fast technique for inducing SI and H conditions that can be used by untrained agents (with or without drugs)?

“16. Is it possible to find a gas that can be used to gain SI control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless: one shot, etc.?

“17. What are full details on ‘sleep-inducing machine’?

“18. How can sodium A or P or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, aspirin tablets, common medicines, coke, tooth paste?

“19. How effective can the ‘carotid artery technique’ be made? Can it be used while subject is unconscious? Is it faster than other techniques?

“20. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans? Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?

“21. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans?

“Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?”C and W

On January 7th, 1953, they reported that:

“These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H (hypnotic) controlled state by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words, and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”W

And in 1954:

“Miss (whited out) was instructed (having expressed a fear of firearms) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss (whited out) (now in a deep hypnotic sleep). Failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss (whited out). She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill’ (whited out) for failing to awaken. Miss (whited out) carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at (whited out) and then proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened. Miss (whited out) expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”W

Nazis

The claim of Nazi involvement in these atrocities usually seems to come not from survivors but from outsiders researching the issue and trying to explain how it all came about. For example, Ron Patton has written that

“After WWII, the U.S. Department of Defense secretly imported many of the top German Nazi and Italian Fascist scientists and spies into the United States via South America and the Vatican. The code name for this operation was Project PAPERCLIP. One of the more prominent finds for the U.S. was German General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler‘s Chief of Intelligence against Russia. Upon arriving in Washington D.C. in 1945, Gehlen met extensively with President Truman, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Allen Dulles, who would later become the stalwart head of the CIA. The objective of their brain-storming sessions was to reorganize the nominal American intelligence operation, transforming it into a highly-efficient covert organization. The culmination of their efforts produced the Central Intelligence Group in 1946, renamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947.”16

The clearest connection with the Nazis is through the above-mentioned Project Paperclip. As riverrunhas written,

“….The Nazis had done some very “good” work in rocket science and psychological, chemical, and biological warfare. It seemed a pity to let that work disappear in a puff of petrol smoke in a ditch at Hitler’s Wedding Reception. “As early as the invasion of Normandy, in June of 1944, at least ten thousand American intelligence officers were charged with seizing Nazi experts in munitions, rocketry, and psychological, biological and chemical research. For good measure, French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis were included as well.
…. “(This project was) like giving Osama Bin Laden‘s experts in suicide bombing an apartment in Alexandria and a Visa Card, so long as they promised to only suicide bomb for our side.”

So, however “crazy conspiracy theorist” it may sound to link these activities to the Nazis, they do seem to follow a clear line back to Nazi medical experiments and related research.

Disney

My first exposure to the idea of Project Monarch came when I met people who had been ritually abused and were trying to explore and defuse their own programming. I found a lot of information describing supposed Project Monarch programming — like Alice in Wonderland, color, gem, and spin programming — which nevertheless is also found in a lot of people who were ritually abused outside of the government’s grasp.

The two main kinds of programming can be described as operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the classic Pavlovian response. A dog salivates when it hears the can opener; a college student jumps at hearing the bell for recess; an abuse survivor has body memories of being unable to breathe at the sight of the exact shade of blue of the blanket in the bed where they were almost smothered. It’s a disparate response which comes from extremely intense or repeated stimuli. As Tem42observes, it is a stimulus-stimulus connection instead of stimulus-response: they are all reacting as if both stimuli were present (the can opener and food, the bell and recess, the bedclothes and the smothering) instead of only the one which is triggering them.

Operant conditioning is a connection between some stimulus and its normal response. We flip a switch and discover that the overhead light turns on, and soon operant conditioning makes this an automatic motion for us. It is what happens when a rat learns what button to press to get fed, or when we make our way through a new piece of software for the first time and watch for consistent responses from it to find out what different commands and buttons do.

Most of the stereotypical programming within ritual abuse is classical conditioning. Using triggers that have seemingly irrelevant effects is a handy way for people to mask the programming and hide what they are doing. Who would believe that an (apparent?) assassin like Sirhan Sirhan was externally controlled and put into a dissociativefugue state by the Smurfs theme song? (This is an entirely fictional example. I believe Sirhan Sirhan was too early for at least the American Smurfs.)

Programming like this can be very involved. One book, movie, or fairytale can be exploited for a huge number of triggers and programs. Both the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are very often used for this, possibly because of their magical and sometimes surreal imagery and patterns as well as their prevalence in mainstream United States culture. But what does that mean?

Imagine you have a friend who you know has been struggling to deal with ritual abuse, to figure out what happened to her and what is going on. Maybe you’re good friends; maybe you trust each other fairly deeply. You might happen to know a particular number or pattern that she finds very triggering; maybe one afternoon you are talking, and you happen to say that triggering number. Maybe she asked you to try something like that, to see what would happen. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you do anyway.

She goes away, markedly. Someone else comes out; they seem little and scared. Maybe you’re used to this; you know she’s multiple, you’ve gotten to know different people in there. That’s okay. You ask her what her name is; it’s Alice17. You find out there are a lot more Alices in there; you realize she thinks you’re going to rape her, that that’s what she’s been taught that she’s there for. Maybe later you discover that 17 is important to them too, because it’s a prime factor of the number that was the big trigger. Whatever. You figure it’s probably because of Alice in Wonderland, because you know your friend is totally obsessed with that book, and any movies or anything else made from it. Maybe you’d heard about Alice in Wonderland programming somewhere already.

Alice freaks out and takes off, maybe even because you’re not doing anything to her. The unknown is hard. Someone else comes around, some sly pain-in-the-ass you’ve met before. They were hanging out there already, keeping an eye on things. They greet you and ask if you’re the White Rabbit. You’re pretty sure you’re not, whatever it is. Later you find out that that’s usually a programmer. They tell you a lot of stuff anyway, and you try to figure out how much of it is to mess with other people in there… things like getting them between two mirrors so they go “through the looking-glass,” or like little snatches of Lewis Carroll poems that do things, but not what they do. Maybe later you learn more, like that “through the looking-glass” means that someone else who was programmed and forced to be a child prostitute gets stuck out for a really long time, or that the poem they gave you makes whoever’s out lose everything in their short-term memory.

Maybe all of this seems totally fantastical to you; unfortunately, the little scene above was drawn straight from personal experience.

Some of the benefits of this kind of programming are:

The child is likely to encounter the movie, or references to it, in many innocent everyday situations, which reinforces the programming at no cost to the abuser. Nursery rhymes are also commonly used, presumably for similar reasons.

As we’ll see a little later on, combining extreme abuse with ludicrously different elements (such as alien abduction or Disney movies) is an easy way for the abusers to seriously damage their victims’ credibility.

It cuts down on the work for the programmer: It’s easy to remember elements that everyone knows from popular books or movies, and nobody has to create triggers from scratch. (Although when it comes to many cases of non-governmental ritual abuse, abusers are simply acting out their own abuse on others rather than embarking on some grand new scheme.)

This is not a claim specifically made about the CIA’s projects in most cases, although it is sometimes connected to abuse by the military. Other forms of programming, though, are rampant in the experiences of Project Monarch survivors.

There are still confusing aspects of these accounts, like the aforementioned and possibly drug-induced experience of seeing Bush reveal his true, humanoid lizard form — which I admit I would really like to believe! Let’s ask again….

Was There Something Specifically Called Project Monarch?

Phillips and O’Brien aren’t the only sources of these claims, obviously. This question brings us back to the beginning of this piece. That is, it can’t be asked sensibly without being split into the original two questions: Was there something specifically called Project Monarch? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

A Moment For the Skeptical

It certainly appears to be true that Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien have surrounded Project Monarch with a cloud of confusing and sometimes entertainingly odd information. Their explanations of what is involved seem almost designed to make it all seem ludicrous — and indeed, this is one of the tools used in ritual abuse and mind control-related abuse. There appear to me to be two real questions raised by such writings: Does a specific “Project Monarch” exist? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

In previous readings on Project Monarch, I had been fortunate enough not to come across O’Brien or Phillips’ controversial writings, nor even Martin Cannon’s article on the subject. In doing research for this writeup, I was especially careful not to use them as resources.

Evidence For Project Monarch As Such

Since Projects MKULTRA and Artichoke, among others, have been documented through information released by the CIA itselfA,B, we do know that the CIA has done extensive experimentation on civilians around the issues of programming, mind control, memory retention and erasure, the effects of various drugs, et cetera. I set out to look for information about Project Monarch in relation to these confirmed projects.

I did find a few sites that assert they have printed evidence that Project Monarch existed.y,z The basic information they give seems to be that MKULTRA was a large enterprise with 149 stated sub-projects – which can be confirmed by reading the information released by the CIAA,B – and that Project Monarch was a specific sub-project.

The first evidence I found was a listserv post which claimed that Project Monarch was Subproject 84 of MKULTRAz, but without having the released documents to look at, I can’t tell whether this is because it is called that in the text, or because of the content of Subproject 84. The subprojects of MKULTRA have titles ranging from “Marijuana Research” to “Unwitting Drug Tests at University of Maryland,” “Rapid Hypnotic Induction,” and “Optics mixed with Biological Warfare–Cuba Chapter.”A

The declassified folder of documents on Subproject 84 is apparently labeled “Hypnosis Work,” according to the list of documents which John Marks received (under the Freedom of Information Act) for his research on the book “The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”A This seems inconclusive to me; while the general description of the work involved in Project Monarch could fit under “Hypnosis Work,” it could just as easily fit under many of the other MKULTRA subprojects listed there.

There is also an article by Ron Patton wherein he states that

“The most incriminating statement to date made by a government official as to the possible existence of Project MONARCH was extracted by (historian and investigative reporter) Anton Chaitkin, a writer for the publication, The New Federalist. When former CIA Director William Colby was asked directly, “What about monarch?” he replied angrily and ambiguously, “We stopped that between the late 1960‘s and the early 1970‘s.”16

I don’t consider that to be very strong evidence, because I have not been able to find any primary source documents quoting William Colby, even the original Chaitkin article. It is interesting, if true, but hardly conclusive. After writing and posting this piece, however, I was approached by a casual acquaintance who I had forgotten was a ritual abuse survivor. I found out that she had the kind of programming frequently associated with Project Monarch, and that she had an online journal in which she had tried to replicate a form she had once seen with her name on it — a form which had been headed, “MONARCH/MKULTRA.”y I hope to get her permission to interview her for this writeup soon.

The Spin Doctors: Why Does It All Seem So Strange?

I know people personally, offline, who remember being ritually abused by the government in some of the ways described above, who have seen many of their experiences reflected in the writings of apparent Project Monarch survivors like Brice Taylor. As Timeshredder points out, Taylor’s accounts of Project Monarch appeared after O’Brien’s, although given the nature of linear time I feel bound to point out that someone’s accounts have to come first.

Martin Cannon, in his article on Phillips and O’Brien which forms the basis for the writeup above, addresses the issue of “which came first”:

“Just to make matters pluperfectly surreal: Mark Phillips has privately admitted to at least one researcher that he (Phillips) concocted the name ‘Project Monarch,’ just to see who would pick it up. At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited – which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a ‘Project Monarch’ well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario.”20

Cannon himself also states therein that “Little about the basic Monarch theory struck me as technically implausible – indeed, this putative project seems, in many ways, the logical extension of MKULTRA.” His conjecture seems to be that much of the information Mark Phillips has helped release on the subject was designed to cloud the issue. Combining survivor testimony with false information is one of the main tools used to cover up ritual abuse. For example, Pamela Hudson, LCSW and author of “Ritual Child Abuse: Discovery, Diagnosis and Treatment,”

“said it became apparent to her that perpetrators actually set up stagings for incidents of abuse. Perpetrators dressed as space aliens or cartoon characters, so that later when a child was questioned by a therapist, lawyer, or police officer, the child might say that the abuser was an alien or Mickey Mouse – and the whole story might be dismissed as fabrication.”14

Along the same lines, Martin Cannon (author of the article debunking Cathy O’Brien’s story) writes elsewhere, on the subject of alien abductions, that:

“I posit that the abductees HAVE been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy — or, more precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: The kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction is real. But the little grey men from Zeti Reticuli are NOT real; they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather, they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.”11

Kathleen Sullivan, among others, has spoken eloquently on the way this dynamic plays out and on some of the hidden repercussions for survivors who go public with their stories:

“…I am quite amused that Icke, who blatantly reinforces ‘lizard men’ screen memories in high-level MC survivors’ minds to discredit them to the public and in court, is suddenly helping to expose Mark. I’ve seen this behavior before. In this instance, former business partners (Gunderson, Icke, Phillips and Bowart/Kirby) suddenly turn on one of their own, AFTER it is obvious that their partner’s (sic) are not going to behave and be quiet about his activities. The others had years of warning from the victims, to step out and denounce him.”The way I see it, Mark became too much of a liability to them. This behavior on the part of Mark’s friends/partners is not dissimilar to when children go to the police and media about a group of criminal cultists who have been ritually traumatizing and raping them for years. The cultists throw out one of their people for the police and legal system to make an open fuss over and slap in prison, and the others continue doing their dirty work just like before, never being legally named.

“In the MC survivor community, I’ve seen this tactic taken one step further. ‘Good guy bad guy’ routine. By helping to publicly out their partner, after having been tight with him for many years, it makes other perps look like they are heros. (sic) Then the the (sic) outed perp’s victims (eg: Brice) go running to THEM for protection and information. And the survivor’s external control and victimization continues….”22

While it is difficult to know how to distinguish truth from programmed smokescreen in accounts like Cathy O’Brien’s, it is possible to look at the events that we can verify and begin to build a sort of mental filter for fact and torturous fiction. For example, one self-described “alleged survivor,” Carol Rutz, tells a story very like Cathy’s in structure and timeline, but much less lurid in problematic detail. She describes her

“intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of starting at the tender age of four. Through a series of FOIA‘s to various departments of the government, I have amassed an incredible amount of material that validates my personal experiences. I have also found pictures of machines that were used in these experiments that match drawings I made during my healing process,”

all of which she also provides to her readers.1,4Now, I’m not saying Cathy O’Brien is lying or that nothing she describes has happened to her, only that she has been manipulatively exploited to make all of these issues seem more improbable than they really are. We can still learn a lot from what she has to say. As John Gentry points out,

“In the balance, Phillips and O’Brien have helped literally tens of thousands awaken to the ongoing designs of the New World Order, one world government bunch; and pointed repeatedly and poignantly to their (NWO) Achilles’ Heel: their treatment of women and children.”21

The programming, torture, child sexual abuse, and the rest of what is described by people like Cathy Phillips, are a form of ritual abuse. In these cases, it is sometimes called government ritual abuse or government-sponsored ritual abuse.

As we can see from Timeshredder’s writeup above, ritual abuse is highly controversial. Accounts of ritual abuse are frequently characterized by elements that seem too extreme to have happened to anyone, or even laughable — like seeing the President turn into a giant lizard.

Nevertheless, there is a wealth of government-released evidence for the former, and a variety of possible explanations for the latter, especially given that a great deal of the government’s admitted experimentation involved heavy hallucinogens and other drugs administered without the survivor’s knowledge or permission.

Beyond Project Monarch: A few other cases of governmental ritual abuse

Of course, it’s easy to glibly say that there are explanations and evidence for these things. It’s harder to find them. For example, while there are Freedom of Information Act-released documents on a lot of the horrific acts committed by the CIA under MKULTRA, they represent only a small portion of the original documentation. According to Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in his prepared statement to the 1977U.S. Senate Committee HearingsD,

Most of what was known about the Agency’s involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General’s office in 1963…. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported.

Searching for clear information on government ritual abuse often requires sifting through a lot of conflicting and confusing information from both sides. A lot of writing on this subject, whether it is denying or supporting these claims, reads like the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap — “CIA, 1939, after Nazis & Commies united, proposed spacebombs that destroy all, unless we finally teach the Moral ABC’s the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus to unite in All-One-God-Faith. Illuminati-Masons-Nazis-White House! Government propaganda destroys! Killing machine secrets for all! ‘WE’RE ALL ONE OR NONE!’”

With enough effort and knowledge, though, clear information can be found, even on….

The Major Claims

While many of the claims made about Project Monarch seem extreme and sometimes even impossible to the casual observer, they often fit in easily with the work that the CIA has admitted to doing in other projects and in MKULTRA itself. The CIA has already admitted to extreme, extensive experiments in mind control, programming, and torture. For example:

According to Dr. Colin Ross, who wrote a long and heavily researched and well-footnoted book about all the declassified information on MKULTRA7, “The deliberate creation of multiple personality in children is an explicitly stated plan in the MKULTRA Subproject Proposal submitted for funding on May 30, 1961.”E (This was Subproject 136, which according to the CIA involved electric shocks and “hypnotically induced anxieties,” among other forms of trauma.) Other MKULTRA experiments they list involved testing mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents on human subjects, biological weapons testing, physical pain endurance and brainwashing techniques.

Files on MKULTRA Subproject 49, labeled “MKULTRA: George White and Federal Bureau of Narcotics” when released under the Freedom of Information Act, included “Experiment 7 – Recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.”1 This is programming: specifically-chosen signals that bring up “acquired information.” (Usually that means orders to do something; sometimes it means fear or traumatic memories.)”Hypnosis” in the CIA files seems to have been a broad category: their proposal for Subproject 136 says in part that “In other cases drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociative states, from the abaissment de niveau mental to multiple personality in so-called mediums, and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.”

CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s testimony to the 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRAd included, in very small part, the following information:

“The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).”D

MKULTRA and other CIA projects also involved nonconsensual radiation testing on unsuspecting citizens, often in conjunction with other government departments.

“…the DOE has disclosed information about the federal government’s human radiation experiments after World War II. These experiments primarily took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, but some have occurred as recently as the 1980s. Eleven thousand documents reviewed disclosed that in at least forty-eight experiments humans were given radioactive isotopes, generally without their consent, to determine the effects of radiation on the body. The DOE has made thousands of documents once kept secret available for public use. Of primary interest to the public was O’Leary’s announcement in December 1993 that documents related to human radiation experiments and exposure to barium and strontium at government weapons laboratories across the country were to be released.”10

(This is according to a biography of Hazel O’Leary, the first woman to become U.S. Secretary of Energy, which cites the Nashville Tennessean for this information10. More information about these experiments can be found on the Department of Energy’s own websiteF.)

Ross also states that “Although MKULTRA has received the most public attention of any of the CIA and military mind control programs, most of its Subprojects were relatively benign compared to experiments carried out in PROJECT OFTEN and MKNAOMI.” MKNAOMI was a successor of MKULTRA, focusing on biological and chemical weapons. The CIA and DIA collaborated on creating and testing these agents. According to the Military Review in November 1970, the United States begins to research “ethnic weapons,”H intended to “target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.”7 MKNAOMI also includes a military project seeking to develop cancer-causing viruses. According to the Congressional Record of 1969, the Department of Defense requested funding “to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired,”8,9 and against which natural immunological processes and medicines would not work. Much of this research takes place at Fort Detrick’s Center for Biological Warfare Research. Under President Nixon, the center is converted to become the National Cancer Institute‘s Frederick Cancer Research and Development, while this project is going on (in 1971)G. In 1979 scientist Robert Gallo of NCI finally isolates a virus to which no natural immunity exists, naming it HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus)G. Later, HTLV-III is renamed HIV.8

But I digress.

Any one of these examples should satisfy anyone seeking a good “conspiracy theory,” and I have limited myself here to only a few of the statements and examples which I can back up solely through United States government documentation. More information on the kind of behavior that constitutes ritual abuse can be found at that node.

So, looking at our general claims:

Have the CIA run mind-control experiments? According to them, yes.

Have at least some of these experiments involve intense programming and torture? Again, according to them, yes.

Have any of these experiments attempted to create an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder? Once again, yes, and in so many words.

Conclusion

Even if Mark Phillips had invented the name “Project Monarch” himself, I believe that would mean nothing about whether this kind of abuse took place. We know that there have been manydifferentprojectsintheCIAalone which perpetrated similar forms of abuse. It is possible that there was not a specific “Project Monarch,” but that most of what is described by “Project Monarch survivors” did happen to them. It is hardly the only government project which is supposed to have extensively abused people. In fact, many of the people I know personally who have experienced similar abuse to that of Taylor and O’Brien do not identify as having been part of Project Monarch or any other specific government project.

When I began writing this piece, that was all that I thought had happened: that even if there was no “Project Monarch,” it would simply have meant that someone gave these experiences a handy label; and that in the absence of more extensive information about government abuse, a lot of people assumed that they were a part of “Project Monarch” because it was the name most often associated with the kind of experiences that they knew they had. Now I believe that Monarch is probably an official name for some part of MKULTRA. For me, the turning point came from talking to people who had been abused in these ways, who had seen CIA paperwork with the word “Monarch” right on it. Your mileage may vary.

However, I believe that the core issue here is that these survivors’ experiences are thrown out, even laughed at, while this kind of abuse goes on all around us. I hope that the extensive research I have done here can help spread awareness of at least one tiny part of this abuse. Thanks for reading.

Works Cited:

Please note that some of these sites are wildly biased in one direction or another, and that in all cases the reference is to specific documents reprinted on the site, not to any commentary that the site’s owners may have included.

Documentation:
(Primary source documentation, mostly from United States government agencies; I highly recommend reading any and all of these documents.)

Project Monarch, unfortunately, is many things to many people. At its most basic, it is one of the CIA’s human experimentation projects, probably as part of MKULTRA. It has become something of a banner term for survivors and conspiracy theorists alike, which is to say that “Project Monarch” is sometimes used as a catch-all term for CIA experimentation in general (as, for that matter, is “MKULTRA”).

The severity of torture involved in a lot of the CIA’s projects has lent Project Monarch something of an air of lunacy. Survivors of any kind are often not believed when they talk about their abuse, and this may be particularly true of survivors whose abuse included their government, specific political figures, the creation of many people inside their bodies, elaborate programming, and extreme and horrific physical, sexual, and mental abuse. On top of that, ritual abuse survivors – including governmental ritual abuse – are often set up to sound like their memories can’t possibly be true, as we’ll see a little later on. Here, we’ll examine what Project Monarch may have been, some of the things that Project Monarch is said to have done, and exactly what evidence there is for all of that.

Disney, E.T., and the Wizard of Oz: What is involved?

The primary claims made about Project Monarch, from what I have read, are that it:

is a CIA-run mind-control experiment

involves intense programming and torture

creates an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder

Some secondary claims (i.e. those made with less frequency or which are in my opinion less relevant to the question of what people have experienced) include (but are not limited to) claiming that it:

includes “elite” government and Hollywood figures

is connected to Freemasonry, the Vatican, Satanists, and/or various other religious groups

is connected to Nazis or Nazism

Project Monarch: Content and Deliverance

Here we’ll look at some of the most common elements attributed to Project Monarch and other government abuse, and look for any evidence of their truth.

CIA Plans

“I am a survivor of mind control experiments performed under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. MK-ULTRA was established in 1953 to counter Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques and consisted of 149 subprojects contracted out to at least 80 institutions including hospitals and Universities. In 1977 Director of Intelligence Stansfield Turner said the program was initiated because the Agency was confronted with ‘learning the state of the art of behavioral modification at a time when the U.S. Government was concerned about inexplicable behavior of persons behind the ‘Iron Curtain‘ and American prisoners of war who had been subjected to so called brainwashing.’”4 — Carol Rutz

As we’ve already seen, the MKULTRA subproject which attempted in part to create “multiple personality disorder” in children used (or at least the documents we have state their intention to use) nonconsensual electroshock, drugging, et cetera; all of these and more items discussed in this writeup tally perfectly with claims made by survivors.
Then there’s Ewen Cameron, who conducted CIA-financed psychiatric experiments where he “would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end, waking them daily only to administer violent electric shocks to the brain.”15 (There’s that pesky electric shock thing again!) According to author Anton Chaitkin, “Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centers of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive.”15

Cameron’s principal interest, at least according to a Wikipedia article on this subject, was in something called “psychic driving,” which they explain as “his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely.”23 This dovetailed perfectly with the work being undertaken by the CIA.

The CIA was eventually brought to trial by the husband of one of his victims, in Orlikow v. U.S.; one of the prosecuting attorneys, James Turner, later wrote a report of the trial. The extensive testimony describing Cameron’s work is graphic and horrifying.
Turner begins by sharing the documentation from the very beginning of Cameron’s experiments:

“Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, submitted a formal grant application to the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology” a CIA front operating at the Cornell University Medical School in New York City. That application proposed to extend brainwashing experimentation which Cameron described as follows:

“i. The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (depatterning).
“ii. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6 or 7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
“iii. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
“iv. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days.

“Cameron also proposed to test drugs such as ‘LSD 25 and other similar agents’ in ‘depatterning’ his patients and to experiment with new methods of ‘inactivating’ the patient during the repetition of verbal signals with other drugs including curare, a drug used in surgery to temporarily paralyze a patient’s involuntary muscles. “Cameron’s application for funds was dated January 21, 1957 and on February 26, 1957 Gottlieb and other CIA officials approved the application in a Memorandum that simply repeats, without reasoning or explanation, the application virtually in haec verba. Shortly thereafter, Gottlieb’s deputy, Lashbrook, approved the first payment to Cameron.”Q

Ewen Cameron, who was already serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association (beginning in 1953 and serving until his death in 1967), and who had helped to found the Canadian Psychiatric AssociationT and served as president (concurrently with his CIA work, in 1958-9S), subsequently helped found and served as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association (1961).

Then there’s the case of “The Finders,” whose Washington, D.C. headquarters held — according to the U.S. Customs report on the matter — evidence of murder; child sexual abuse; photographs of naked children with adult “Finders;” high-tech money transfers; references to activities in Africa, the Bahamas, China, Germany, Hong Kong, London, Malaysia, Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam; “detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes (which) included the impregnation of female members of the… Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping;” and “a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets and participating in a ‘blood ritual’… the photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat’s `womb’ and the `baby goats’ inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children.”i

But wait, there’s more. They also found a warehouse which “contained a large library, two kitchens, a sauna, hot-tub, and a ‘video room.’ The video room seemed to be set up as an indoctrination center…. There were what appeared to be training areas for children and what appeared to be an altar set up in a residential area of the warehouse. Many jars of urine and feces were located in this area.” The report also noted “a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown.”i
According to the U.S. News and World Report as well as the Customs agents themselves, when the agents sought to continue their investigation they were told that the entire investigation had been reclassified as a CIA internal matter, and that:

“The (Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department) report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed (the police) not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.”5

The CIA claimed that the only connection between themselves and the Finders was that a firm which provided CIA officers with computer training “also employed several members of the Finders.” In his article on the subject, David McGowan states that

“It should probably be noted here that the firm that supplied the training didn’t just employ several members of the Finders but appears to have in fact been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the training of its officers to outside contractors. If a ‘private’ firm is utilized in such a capacity, it is in all such cases a front group of the CIA itself.”i

However, I do not have primary source documentation to illustrate this point, so I present it only as one possible aspect of the case.

Electroshock

One startlingly frequent element of government torture and ritual abuse is the use of electroshock in some capacity. As previously mentioned, we know that the CIA has conducted many experiments with electric shocks to (for example) find a way of erasing memories.V Electric shocks have also been used for a long time in aversion therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and are frequently found even in non-governmental and non-ritual abuse survivors’ stories.

Mark Phillips says about Project Monarch that

“There are ’strap on’ head and foot devices that could deliver a mind altering shock of an exact duration according to the subject’s brainwave activity and/or heartbeat. Other portable hand held stun gun type devices can deliver shock up to 200,000 volts for a variety of reasons, but primarily for instant control of the conscious mind.”2

In a more general form, this is a frequently heard claim; several people speaking to the 1995 Senate Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments made statements such as

“Between 1972 and 1976, (Dr. Green) and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, sub-project, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation and mind-control experiments, which I have submitted in your written documentation. I was caught twice, and Dr. Green ruthlessly used electric shock, drugs, spun me on a table, put shots in my stomach and my back, dislocated my joints, and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal.” (Christine DeNicola) “Between the years of 1957 and 1974, I became a pawn in the government’s game, whose ultimate goal was mind-control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life, and the only explanations given to me were that ‘the end justifies the means,’ and ‘I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism.’” (C. Mullen)

A cursory googling of “stun gun” and “200,000 volts” turns up stun guns that go this high and higher (running on only one or two 9-volt batteries) at sites like pepperspraymace.com.12
One of these, protectmefirst.com, explains the effects of stun guns on the human body:

“The stun gun is designed to key into the nervous system. It dumps its energy into the muscles at a high pulse frequency that makes the muscles work very rapidly, but not very efficiently. This rapid work cycle depletes blood sugar by converting it into lactic acid all in just seconds. The resulting energy loss makes it difficult to move and function. At the same time, the tiny neurological impulses that travel throughout the body to direct muscle movement are interrupted. This causes disorientation and loss of balance, leaving the attacker in a passive and confused condition for several minutes. Still there is no significant effect on the heart and other organs.”As a general rule, a 1/4 second contact will repel and startle the attacker, giving intense pain and muscle contraction. One to two seconds will cause intense pain, muscle spasms and a dazed mental state, this may drop the attacker to the ground. Over three seconds will cause intense pain, loss of balance, loss of muscle control, mental confusion and disorientation. Generally any charge over three seconds will cause the aggressor to fall to the ground. The aggressor will be unable to recover for several minutes and effects may last for up to fifteen minutes.”13

Creation of “Multiple Personalities” and/or “Sleeper Agents”

“If you think creating Multiple Personality Disorder is too bizarre and strange to be real … again, you just have to look at the LSD, the brain implant research, some of the sensory deprivation, the Ames Leaf Room, using millions and millions of dollars to pay psychics to spy on other countries while lying on tables in the USA. Once you have that context, then creating Multiple Personality Disorder is kind of small …the very fact that you can create it artificially, to me indicates that it can be created artificially or on purpose, and also that it’s likely to happen naturally.”

As someone who is multiple myself, I don’t like to speak to the multiple issue. I’ll only note here that the vast majority of the psychiatric community is absolutely convinced that “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder” only occurs in situations of abuse, and some of them insist it must be extremely violent and particularly traumatic abuse.

Whether the government was able to successfully program people, either within multiple systems or otherwise, who could act as assassins, drug mules, et cetera, is another question. Let’s let the CIA themselves address that one. Most sources refer to this simply as a 1951 memo; one gives the “approximate date” as “January 1, 1952.” It is labeled Bluebird. However, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke overlapped, in some cases both being engaged in the same activity, and both were engaged in studying various methods and effects relating to hypnotismC; Project MKULTRA, of which I believe Monarch was a part, began as an offshoot of Project Artichoke. Therefore, I believe that the following illustrate at least some of what the CIA was trying to do and had achieved around the beginning of Project MKULTRA; we already know it was their stated intention to develop these findings further in MKULTRA/Monarch.

“1. Can we “condition” by post-H (hypnotic) suggestion agency employees (or persons of interest to this agency) to prevent them from giving information to any unauthorized source or for committing any act on behalf of a foreign or domestic enemy?”2. Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit? (Long range).
“3. Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?
“4. Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? (Short, immediate activity)
“5. Can we by SI and H techniques force a subject (unwilling or otherwise) to travel long distances, commit specified acts and return to us or bring documents or materials? Can a person acting under post-H control successfully travel long distances?
“6. Can we use SI and H to combat fatigue, produce extreme mental effort?
“7. Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?
“8. Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?
“9. Can we design tests to determine whether or not an enemy agent has been conditioned by SI and H or any other method?
“10. Can we detect SI and H by use of SI and H (regression)?
“11. Can we make a ‘conditioned’ subject reveal by SI and H specifically how they were conditioned (drugs, torture, fatigue, hostage pressure, techniques)?
“12. Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?
“13. How long can we sustain a post-H suggestion-unaided-with reinforcement?
“14. What would be fastest way to induce SI and H conditions – with drugs – or without any mechanical aids?
“15. Can we devise a standard simple relatively fast technique for inducing SI and H conditions that can be used by untrained agents (with or without drugs)?
“16. Is it possible to find a gas that can be used to gain SI control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless: one shot, etc.?
“17. What are full details on ’sleep-inducing machine’?
“18. How can sodium A or P or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, aspirin tablets, common medicines, coke, tooth paste?
“19. How effective can the ‘carotid artery technique’ be made? Can it be used while subject is unconscious? Is it faster than other techniques?
“20. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans? Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?
“21. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans?
“Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?”C and W

On January 7th, 1953, they reported that:

“These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H (hypnotic) controlled state by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words, and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”W

And in 1954:

“Miss (whited out) was instructed (having expressed a fear of firearms) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss (whited out) (now in a deep hypnotic sleep). Failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss (whited out). She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill’ (whited out) for failing to awaken. Miss (whited out) carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at (whited out) and then proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened. Miss (whited out) expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”W

Nazis

The claim of Nazi involvement in these atrocities usually seems to come not from survivors but from outsiders researching the issue and trying to explain how it all came about. For example, Ron Patton has written that

“After WWII, the U.S. Department of Defense secretly imported many of the top German Nazi and Italian Fascist scientists and spies into the United States via South America and the Vatican. The code name for this operation was Project PAPERCLIP. One of the more prominent finds for the U.S. was German General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence against Russia. Upon arriving in Washington D.C. in 1945, Gehlen met extensively with President Truman, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Allen Dulles, who would later become the stalwart head of the CIA. The objective of their brain-storming sessions was to reorganize the nominal American intelligence operation, transforming it into a highly-efficient covert organization. The culmination of their efforts produced the Central Intelligence Group in 1946, renamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947.”16

The clearest connection with the Nazis is through the above-mentioned Project Paperclip. As riverrun has written,

“….The Nazis had done some very “good” work in rocket science and psychological, chemical, and biological warfare. It seemed a pity to let that work disappear in a puff of petrol smoke in a ditch at Hitler’s Wedding Reception. “As early as the invasion of Normandy, in June of 1944, at least ten thousand American intelligence officers were charged with seizing Nazi experts in munitions, rocketry, and psychological, biological and chemical research. For good measure, French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis were included as well.
…. “(This project was) like giving Osama Bin Laden’s experts in suicide bombing an apartment in Alexandria and a Visa Card, so long as they promised to only suicide bomb for our side.”

So, however “crazy conspiracy theorist” it may sound to link these activities to the Nazis, they do seem to follow a clear line back to Nazi medical experiments and related research.

Disney

My first exposure to the idea of Project Monarch came when I met people who had been ritually abused and were trying to explore and defuse their own programming. I found a lot of information describing supposed Project Monarch programming — like Alice in Wonderland, color, gem, and spin programming — which nevertheless is also found in a lot of people who were ritually abused outside of the government’s grasp.
The two main kinds of programming can be described as operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the classic Pavlovian response. A dog salivates when it hears the can opener; a college student jumps at hearing the bell for recess; an abuse survivor has body memories of being unable to breathe at the sight of the exact shade of blue of the blanket in the bed where they were almost smothered. It’s a disparate response which comes from extremely intense or repeated stimuli. As Tem42 observes, it is a stimulus-stimulus connection instead of stimulus-response: they are all reacting as if both stimuli were present (the can opener and food, the bell and recess, the bedclothes and the smothering) instead of only the one which is triggering them.

Operant conditioning is a connection between some stimulus and its normal response. We flip a switch and discover that the overhead light turns on, and soon operant conditioning makes this an automatic motion for us. It is what happens when a rat learns what button to press to get fed, or when we make our way through a new piece of software for the first time and watch for consistent responses from it to find out what different commands and buttons do.

Most of the stereotypical programming within ritual abuse is classical conditioning. Using triggers that have seemingly irrelevant effects is a handy way for people to mask the programming and hide what they are doing. Who would believe that an (apparent?) assassin like Sirhan Sirhan was externally controlled and put into a dissociative fugue state by the Smurfs theme song? (This is an entirely fictional example. I believe Sirhan Sirhan was too early for at least the American Smurfs.)

Programming like this can be very involved. One book, movie, or fairytale can be exploited for a huge number of triggers and programs. Both the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are very often used for this, possibly because of their magical and sometimes surreal imagery and patterns as well as their prevalence in mainstream United States culture. But what does that mean?

Imagine you have a friend who you know has been struggling to deal with ritual abuse, to figure out what happened to her and what is going on. Maybe you’re good friends; maybe you trust each other fairly deeply. You might happen to know a particular number or pattern that she finds very triggering; maybe one afternoon you are talking, and you happen to say that triggering number. Maybe she asked you to try something like that, to see what would happen. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you do anyway.
She goes away, markedly. Someone else comes out; they seem little and scared. Maybe you’re used to this; you know she’s multiple, you’ve gotten to know different people in there. That’s okay. You ask her what her name is; it’s Alice17. You find out there are a lot more Alices in there; you realize she thinks you’re going to rape her, that that’s what she’s been taught that she’s there for. Maybe later you discover that 17 is important to them too, because it’s a prime factor of the number that was the big trigger. Whatever. You figure it’s probably because of Alice in Wonderland, because you know your friend is totally obsessed with that book, and any movies or anything else made from it. Maybe you’d heard about Alice in Wonderland programming somewhere already.

Alice freaks out and takes off, maybe even because you’re not doing anything to her. The unknown is hard. Someone else comes around, some sly pain-in-the-ass you’ve met before. They were hanging out there already, keeping an eye on things. They greet you and ask if you’re the White Rabbit. You’re pretty sure you’re not, whatever it is. Later you find out that that’s usually a programmer. They tell you a lot of stuff anyway, and you try to figure out how much of it is to mess with other people in there… things like getting them between two mirrors so they go “through the looking-glass,” or like little snatches of Lewis Carroll poems that do things, but not what they do. Maybe later you learn more, like that “through the looking-glass” means that someone else who was programmed and forced to be a child prostitute gets stuck out for a really long time, or that the poem they gave you makes whoever’s out lose everything in their short-term memory.

Maybe all of this seems totally fantastical to you; unfortunately, the little scene above was drawn straight from personal experience.
Some of the benefits of this kind of programming are:

The child is likely to encounter the movie, or references to it, in many innocent everyday situations, which reinforces the programming at no cost to the abuser. Nursery rhymes are also commonly used, presumably for similar reasons.

As we’ll see a little later on, combining extreme abuse with ludicrously different elements (such as alien abduction or Disney movies) is an easy way for the abusers to seriously damage their victims’ credibility.

It cuts down on the work for the programmer: It’s easy to remember elements that everyone knows from popular books or movies, and nobody has to create triggers from scratch. (Although when it comes to many cases of non-governmental ritual abuse, abusers are simply acting out their own abuse on others rather than embarking on some grand new scheme.)

This is not a claim specifically made about the CIA’s projects in most cases, although it is sometimes connected to abuse by the military. Other forms of programming, though, are rampant in the experiences of Project Monarch survivors.

There are still confusing aspects of these accounts, like the aforementioned and possibly drug-induced experience of seeing Bush reveal his true, humanoid lizard form — which I admit I would really like to believe! Let’s ask again….

Was There Something Specifically Called Project Monarch?

Phillips and O’Brien aren’t the only sources of these claims, obviously. This question brings us back to the beginning of this piece. That is, it can’t be asked sensibly without being split into the original two questions: Was there something specifically called Project Monarch? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

A Moment For the Skeptical

It certainly appears to be true that Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien have surrounded Project Monarch with a cloud of confusing and sometimes entertainingly odd information. Their explanations of what is involved seem almost designed to make it all seem ludicrous — and indeed, this is one of the tools used in ritual abuse and mind control-related abuse. There appear to me to be two real questions raised by such writings: Does a specific “Project Monarch” exist? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

In previous readings on Project Monarch, I had been fortunate enough not to come across O’Brien or Phillips’ controversial writings, nor even Martin Cannon’s article on the subject. In doing research for this writeup, I was especially careful not to use them as resources.

Evidence For Project Monarch As Such

Since Projects MKULTRA and Artichoke, among others, have been documented through information released by the CIA itselfA,B, we do know that the CIA has done extensive experimentation on civilians around the issues of programming, mind control, memory retention and erasure, the effects of various drugs, et cetera. I set out to look for information about Project Monarch in relation to these confirmed projects.

I did find a few sites that assert they have printed evidence that Project Monarch existed.y,z The basic information they give seems to be that MKULTRA was a large enterprise with 149 stated sub-projects – which can be confirmed by reading the information released by the CIAA,B – and that Project Monarch was a specific sub-project.

The first evidence I found was a listserv post which claimed that Project Monarch was Subproject 84 of MKULTRAz, but without having the released documents to look at, I can’t tell whether this is because it is called that in the text, or because of the content of Subproject 84. The subprojects of MKULTRA have titles ranging from “Marijuana Research” to “Unwitting Drug Tests at University of Maryland,” “Rapid Hypnotic Induction,” and “Optics mixed with Biological Warfare–Cuba Chapter.”A

The declassified folder of documents on Subproject 84 is apparently labeled “Hypnosis Work,” according to the list of documents which John Marks received (under the Freedom of Information Act) for his research on the book “The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”A This seems inconclusive to me; while the general description of the work involved in Project Monarch could fit under “Hypnosis Work,” it could just as easily fit under many of the other MKULTRA subprojects listed there.

There is also an article by Ron Patton wherein he states that

“The most incriminating statement to date made by a government official as to the possible existence of Project MONARCH was extracted by (historian and investigative reporter) Anton Chaitkin, a writer for the publication, The New Federalist. When former CIA Director William Colby was asked directly, “What about monarch?” he replied angrily and ambiguously, “We stopped that between the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s.”16

I don’t consider that to be very strong evidence, because I have not been able to find any primary source documents quoting William Colby, even the original Chaitkin article. It is interesting, if true, but hardly conclusive. After writing and posting this piece, however, I was approached by a casual acquaintance who I had forgotten was a ritual abuse survivor. I found out that she had the kind of programming frequently associated with Project Monarch, and that she had an online journal in which she had tried to replicate a form she had once seen with her name on it — a form which had been headed, “MONARCH/MKULTRA.”y I hope to get her permission to interview her for this writeup soon.

The Spin Doctors: Why Does It All Seem So Strange?

I know people personally, offline, who remember being ritually abused by the government in some of the ways described above, who have seen many of their experiences reflected in the writings of apparent Project Monarch survivors like Brice Taylor. As Timeshredder points out, Taylor’s accounts of Project Monarch appeared after O’Brien’s, although given the nature of linear time I feel bound to point out that someone’s accounts have to come first.

Martin Cannon, in his article on Phillips and O’Brien which forms the basis for the writeup above, addresses the issue of “which came first”:

“Just to make matters pluperfectly surreal: Mark Phillips has privately admitted to at least one researcher that he (Phillips) concocted the name ‘Project Monarch,’ just to see who would pick it up. At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited – which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a ‘Project Monarch’ well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario.”20

Cannon himself also states therein that “Little about the basic Monarch theory struck me as technically implausible – indeed, this putative project seems, in many ways, the logical extension of MKULTRA.” His conjecture seems to be that much of the information Mark Phillips has helped release on the subject was designed to cloud the issue. Combining survivor testimony with false information is one of the main tools used to cover up ritual abuse. For example, Pamela Hudson, LCSW and author of “Ritual Child Abuse: Discovery, Diagnosis and Treatment,”

“said it became apparent to her that perpetrators actually set up stagings for incidents of abuse. Perpetrators dressed as space aliens or cartoon characters, so that later when a child was questioned by a therapist, lawyer, or police officer, the child might say that the abuser was an alien or Mickey Mouse – and the whole story might be dismissed as fabrication.”14

Along the same lines, Martin Cannon (author of the article debunking Cathy O’Brien’s story) writes elsewhere, on the subject of alien abductions, that:

“I posit that the abductees HAVE been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy — or, more precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: The kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction is real. But the little grey men from Zeti Reticuli are NOT real; they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather, they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.”11

Kathleen Sullivan, among others, has spoken eloquently on the way this dynamic plays out and on some of the hidden repercussions for survivors who go public with their stories:

“…I am quite amused that Icke, who blatantly reinforces ‘lizard men’ screen memories in high-level MC survivors’ minds to discredit them to the public and in court, is suddenly helping to expose Mark. I’ve seen this behavior before. In this instance, former business partners (Gunderson, Icke, Phillips and Bowart/Kirby) suddenly turn on one of their own, AFTER it is obvious that their partner’s (sic) are not going to behave and be quiet about his activities. The others had years of warning from the victims, to step out and denounce him.”The way I see it, Mark became too much of a liability to them. This behavior on the part of Mark’s friends/partners is not dissimilar to when children go to the police and media about a group of criminal cultists who have been ritually traumatizing and raping them for years. The cultists throw out one of their people for the police and legal system to make an open fuss over and slap in prison, and the others continue doing their dirty work just like before, never being legally named.
“In the MC survivor community, I’ve seen this tactic taken one step further. ‘Good guy bad guy’ routine. By helping to publicly out their partner, after having been tight with him for many years, it makes other perps look like they are heros. (sic) Then the the (sic) outed perp’s victims (eg: Brice) go running to THEM for protection and information. And the survivor’s external control and victimization continues….”22

While it is difficult to know how to distinguish truth from programmed smokescreen in accounts like Cathy O’Brien’s, it is possible to look at the events that we can verify and begin to build a sort of mental filter for fact and torturous fiction. For example, one self-described “alleged survivor,” Carol Rutz, tells a story very like Cathy’s in structure and timeline, but much less lurid in problematic detail. She describes her

“intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of starting at the tender age of four. Through a series of FOIA’s to various departments of the government, I have amassed an incredible amount of material that validates my personal experiences. I have also found pictures of machines that were used in these experiments that match drawings I made during my healing process,”

all of which she also provides to her readers.1,4Now, I’m not saying Cathy O’Brien is lying or that nothing she describes has happened to her, only that she has been manipulatively exploited to make all of these issues seem more improbable than they really are. We can still learn a lot from what she has to say. As John Gentry points out,

“In the balance, Phillips and O’Brien have helped literally tens of thousands awaken to the ongoing designs of the New World Order, one world government bunch; and pointed repeatedly and poignantly to their (NWO) Achilles’ Heel: their treatment of women and children.”21

The programming, torture, child sexual abuse, and the rest of what is described by people like Cathy Phillips, are a form of ritual abuse. In these cases, it is sometimes called government ritual abuse or government-sponsored ritual abuse.

As we can see from Timeshredder’s writeup above, ritual abuse is highly controversial. Accounts of ritual abuse are frequently characterized by elements that seem too extreme to have happened to anyone, or even laughable — like seeing the President turn into a giant lizard.
Nevertheless, there is a wealth of government-released evidence for the former, and a variety of possible explanations for the latter, especially given that a great deal of the government’s admitted experimentation involved heavy hallucinogens and other drugs administered without the survivor’s knowledge or permission.

Beyond Project Monarch: A few other cases of governmental ritual abuse

Of course, it’s easy to glibly say that there are explanations and evidence for these things. It’s harder to find them. For example, while there are Freedom of Information Act-released documents on a lot of the horrific acts committed by the CIA under MKULTRA, they represent only a small portion of the original documentation. According to Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in his prepared statement to the 1977 U.S. Senate Committee HearingsD,

Most of what was known about the Agency’s involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General’s office in 1963…. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported.

Searching for clear information on government ritual abuse often requires sifting through a lot of conflicting and confusing information from both sides. A lot of writing on this subject, whether it is denying or supporting these claims, reads like the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap — “CIA, 1939, after Nazis & Commies united, proposed spacebombs that destroy all, unless we finally teach the Moral ABC’s the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus to unite in All-One-God-Faith. Illuminati-Masons-Nazis-White House! Government propaganda destroys! Killing machine secrets for all! ‘WE’RE ALL ONE OR NONE!’”

With enough effort and knowledge, though, clear information can be found, even on….

The Major Claims

While many of the claims made about Project Monarch seem extreme and sometimes even impossible to the casual observer, they often fit in easily with the work that the CIA has admitted to doing in other projects and in MKULTRA itself. The CIA has already admitted to extreme, extensive experiments in mind control, programming, and torture. For example:

According to Dr. Colin Ross, who wrote a long and heavily researched and well-footnoted book about all the declassified information on MKULTRA7, “The deliberate creation of multiple personality in children is an explicitly stated plan in the MKULTRA Subproject Proposal submitted for funding on May 30, 1961.”E (This was Subproject 136, which according to the CIA involved electric shocks and “hypnotically induced anxieties,” among other forms of trauma.) Other MKULTRA experiments they list involved testing mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents on human subjects, biological weapons testing, physical pain endurance and brainwashing techniques.

Files on MKULTRA Subproject 49, labeled “MKULTRA: George White and Federal Bureau of Narcotics” when released under the Freedom of Information Act, included “Experiment 7 – Recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.”1 This is programming: specifically-chosen signals that bring up “acquired information.” (Usually that means orders to do something; sometimes it means fear or traumatic memories.)”Hypnosis” in the CIA files seems to have been a broad category: their proposal for Subproject 136 says in part that “In other cases drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociative states, from the abaissment de niveau mental to multiple personality in so-called mediums, and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.”

CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s testimony to the 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRAd included, in very small part, the following information:

“The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).”D

MKULTRA and other CIA projects also involved nonconsensual radiation testing on unsuspecting citizens, often in conjunction with other government departments.

“…the DOE has disclosed information about the federal government’s human radiation experiments after World War II. These experiments primarily took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, but some have occurred as recently as the 1980s. Eleven thousand documents reviewed disclosed that in at least forty-eight experiments humans were given radioactive isotopes, generally without their consent, to determine the effects of radiation on the body. The DOE has made thousands of documents once kept secret available for public use. Of primary interest to the public was O’Leary’s announcement in December 1993 that documents related to human radiation experiments and exposure to barium and strontium at government weapons laboratories across the country were to be released.”10

(This is according to a biography of Hazel O’Leary, the first woman to become U.S. Secretary of Energy, which cites the Nashville Tennessean for this information10. More information about these experiments can be found on the Department of Energy’s own websiteF.)

Ross also states that “Although MKULTRA has received the most public attention of any of the CIA and military mind control programs, most of its Subprojects were relatively benign compared to experiments carried out in PROJECT OFTEN and MKNAOMI.” MKNAOMI was a successor of MKULTRA, focusing on biological and chemical weapons. The CIA and DIA collaborated on creating and testing these agents. According to the Military Review in November 1970, the United States begins to research “ethnic weapons,”H intended to “target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.”7 MKNAOMI also includes a military project seeking to develop cancer-causing viruses. According to the Congressional Record of 1969, the Department of Defense requested funding “to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired,”8,9 and against which natural immunological processes and medicines would not work. Much of this research takes place at Fort Detrick’s Center for Biological Warfare Research. Under President Nixon, the center is converted to become the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick Cancer Research and Development, while this project is going on (in 1971)G. In 1979 scientist Robert Gallo of NCI finally isolates a virus to which no natural immunity exists, naming it HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus)G. Later, HTLV-III is renamed HIV.8

But I digress.

Any one of these examples should satisfy anyone seeking a good “conspiracy theory,” and I have limited myself here to only a few of the statements and examples which I can back up solely through United States government documentation. More information on the kind of behavior that constitutes ritual abuse can be found at that node.
So, looking at our general claims:

Have the CIA run mind-control experiments? According to them, yes.

Have at least some of these experiments involve intense programming and torture? Again, according to them, yes.

Have any of these experiments attempted to create an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder? Once again, yes, and in so many words.

Conclusion

Even if Mark Phillips had invented the name “Project Monarch” himself, I believe that would mean nothing about whether this kind of abuse took place. We know that there have been many different projects in the CIA alone which perpetrated similar forms of abuse. It is possible that there was not a specific “Project Monarch,” but that most of what is described by “Project Monarch survivors” did happen to them. It is hardly the only government project which is supposed to have extensively abused people. In fact, many of the people I know personally who have experienced similar abuse to that of Taylor and O’Brien do not identify as having been part of Project Monarch or any other specific government project.

When I began writing this piece, that was all that I thought had happened: that even if there was no “Project Monarch,” it would simply have meant that someone gave these experiences a handy label; and that in the absence of more extensive information about government abuse, a lot of people assumed that they were a part of “Project Monarch” because it was the name most often associated with the kind of experiences that they knew they had. Now I believe that Monarch is probably an official name for some part of MKULTRA. For me, the turning point came from talking to people who had been abused in these ways, who had seen CIA paperwork with the word “Monarch” right on it. Your mileage may vary.
However, I believe that the core issue here is that these survivors’ experiences are thrown out, even laughed at, while this kind of abuse goes on all around us. I hope that the extensive research I have done here can help spread awareness of at least one tiny part of this abuse. Thanks for reading.

Works Cited:

Please note that some of these sites are wildly biased in one direction or another, and that in all cases the reference is to specific documents reprinted on the site, not to any commentary that the site’s owners may have included.Documentation:
(Primary source documentation, mostly from United States government agencies; I highly recommend reading any and all of these documents.)

Project Monarch, unfortunately, is many things to many people. At its most basic, it is one of the CIA’s human experimentation projects, probably as part of MKULTRA. It has become something of a banner term for survivors and conspiracy theorists alike, which is to say that “Project Monarch” is sometimes used as a catch-all term for CIA experimentation in general (as, for that matter, is “MKULTRA”).

The severity of torture involved in a lot of the CIA’s projects has lent Project Monarch something of an air of lunacy. Survivors of any kind are often not believed when they talk about their abuse, and this may be particularly true of survivors whose abuse included their government, specific political figures, the creation of many people inside their bodies, elaborate programming, and extreme and horrific physical, sexual, and mental abuse. On top of that, ritual abuse survivors – including governmental ritual abuse – are often set up to sound like their memories can’t possibly be true, as we’ll see a little later on. Here, we’ll examine what Project Monarch may have been, some of the things that Project Monarch is said to have done, and exactly what evidence there is for all of that.

Disney, E.T., and the Wizard of Oz: What is involved?

The primary claims made about Project Monarch, from what I have read, are that it:

is a CIA-run mind-control experiment

involves intense programming and torture

creates an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder

Some secondary claims (i.e. those made with less frequency or which are in my opinion less relevant to the question of what people have experienced) include (but are not limited to) claiming that it:

includes “elite” government and Hollywood figures

is connected to Freemasonry, the Vatican, Satanists, and/or various other religious groups

is connected to Nazis or Nazism

Project Monarch: Content and Deliverance

Here we’ll look at some of the most common elements attributed to Project Monarch and other government abuse, and look for any evidence of their truth.

CIA Plans

“I am a survivor of mind control experiments performed under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program. MK-ULTRA was established in 1953 to counter Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques and consisted of 149 subprojects contracted out to at least 80 institutions including hospitals and Universities. In 1977 Director of Intelligence Stansfield Turner said the program was initiated because the Agency was confronted with ‘learning the state of the art of behavioral modification at a time when the U.S. Government was concerned about inexplicable behavior of persons behind the ‘Iron Curtain‘ and American prisoners of war who had been subjected to so called brainwashing.’”4 — Carol Rutz

As we’ve already seen, the MKULTRA subproject which attempted in part to create “multiple personality disorder” in children used (or at least the documents we have state their intention to use) nonconsensual electroshock, drugging, et cetera; all of these and more items discussed in this writeup tally perfectly with claims made by survivors.
Then there’s Ewen Cameron, who conducted CIA-financed psychiatric experiments where he “would drug his victims to sleep for weeks on end, waking them daily only to administer violent electric shocks to the brain.”15 (There’s that pesky electric shock thing again!) According to author Anton Chaitkin, “Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centers of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive.”15

Cameron’s principal interest, at least according to a Wikipedia article on this subject, was in something called “psychic driving,” which they explain as “his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely.”23 This dovetailed perfectly with the work being undertaken by the CIA.

The CIA was eventually brought to trial by the husband of one of his victims, in Orlikow v. U.S.; one of the prosecuting attorneys, James Turner, later wrote a report of the trial. The extensive testimony describing Cameron’s work is graphic and horrifying.
Turner begins by sharing the documentation from the very beginning of Cameron’s experiments:

“Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, submitted a formal grant application to the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology” a CIA front operating at the Cornell University Medical School in New York City. That application proposed to extend brainwashing experimentation which Cameron described as follows:

“i. The breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks (depatterning).
“ii. The intensive repetition (16 hours a day for 6 or 7 days) of the prearranged verbal signal.
“iii. During this period of intensive repetition the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation.
“iv. Repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patient, after the conclusion of the period, into continuous sleep for 7-10 days.

“Cameron also proposed to test drugs such as ‘LSD 25 and other similar agents’ in ‘depatterning’ his patients and to experiment with new methods of ‘inactivating’ the patient during the repetition of verbal signals with other drugs including curare, a drug used in surgery to temporarily paralyze a patient’s involuntary muscles. “Cameron’s application for funds was dated January 21, 1957 and on February 26, 1957 Gottlieb and other CIA officials approved the application in a Memorandum that simply repeats, without reasoning or explanation, the application virtually in haec verba. Shortly thereafter, Gottlieb’s deputy, Lashbrook, approved the first payment to Cameron.”Q

Ewen Cameron, who was already serving as president of the American Psychiatric Association (beginning in 1953 and serving until his death in 1967), and who had helped to found the Canadian Psychiatric AssociationT and served as president (concurrently with his CIA work, in 1958-9S), subsequently helped found and served as the first president of the World Psychiatric Association (1961).

Then there’s the case of “The Finders,” whose Washington, D.C. headquarters held — according to the U.S. Customs report on the matter — evidence of murder; child sexual abuse; photographs of naked children with adult “Finders;” high-tech money transfers; references to activities in Africa, the Bahamas, China, Germany, Hong Kong, London, Malaysia, Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam; “detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes (which) included the impregnation of female members of the… Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping;” and “a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets and participating in a ‘blood ritual’… the photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goat’s `womb’ and the `baby goats’ inside the womb, and the presentation of a goat’s head to one of the children.”i

But wait, there’s more. They also found a warehouse which “contained a large library, two kitchens, a sauna, hot-tub, and a ‘video room.’ The video room seemed to be set up as an indoctrination center…. There were what appeared to be training areas for children and what appeared to be an altar set up in a residential area of the warehouse. Many jars of urine and feces were located in this area.” The report also noted “a systematic response to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors, etc. A member of the Finders would respond and gather as much information as possible about the habits, identity, occupation, etc., of the family. The use to which this information was to be put is still unknown.”i
According to the U.S. News and World Report as well as the Customs agents themselves, when the agents sought to continue their investigation they were told that the entire investigation had been reclassified as a CIA internal matter, and that:

“The (Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department) report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed (the police) not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.”5

The CIA claimed that the only connection between themselves and the Finders was that a firm which provided CIA officers with computer training “also employed several members of the Finders.” In his article on the subject, David McGowan states that

“It should probably be noted here that the firm that supplied the training didn’t just employ several members of the Finders but appears to have in fact been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Finders organization. It should also be noted that the CIA does not, as a general rule-of-thumb, assign the training of its officers to outside contractors. If a ‘private’ firm is utilized in such a capacity, it is in all such cases a front group of the CIA itself.”i

However, I do not have primary source documentation to illustrate this point, so I present it only as one possible aspect of the case.

Electroshock

One startlingly frequent element of government torture and ritual abuse is the use of electroshock in some capacity. As previously mentioned, we know that the CIA has conducted many experiments with electric shocks to (for example) find a way of erasing memories.V Electric shocks have also been used for a long time in aversion therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and are frequently found even in non-governmental and non-ritual abuse survivors’ stories.

Mark Phillips says about Project Monarch that

“There are ’strap on’ head and foot devices that could deliver a mind altering shock of an exact duration according to the subject’s brainwave activity and/or heartbeat. Other portable hand held stun gun type devices can deliver shock up to 200,000 volts for a variety of reasons, but primarily for instant control of the conscious mind.”2

In a more general form, this is a frequently heard claim; several people speaking to the 1995 Senate Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments made statements such as

“Between 1972 and 1976, (Dr. Green) and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, sub-project, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation and mind-control experiments, which I have submitted in your written documentation. I was caught twice, and Dr. Green ruthlessly used electric shock, drugs, spun me on a table, put shots in my stomach and my back, dislocated my joints, and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal.” (Christine DeNicola) “Between the years of 1957 and 1974, I became a pawn in the government’s game, whose ultimate goal was mind-control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life, and the only explanations given to me were that ‘the end justifies the means,’ and ‘I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism.’” (C. Mullen)

A cursory googling of “stun gun” and “200,000 volts” turns up stun guns that go this high and higher (running on only one or two 9-volt batteries) at sites like pepperspraymace.com.12
One of these, protectmefirst.com, explains the effects of stun guns on the human body:

“The stun gun is designed to key into the nervous system. It dumps its energy into the muscles at a high pulse frequency that makes the muscles work very rapidly, but not very efficiently. This rapid work cycle depletes blood sugar by converting it into lactic acid all in just seconds. The resulting energy loss makes it difficult to move and function. At the same time, the tiny neurological impulses that travel throughout the body to direct muscle movement are interrupted. This causes disorientation and loss of balance, leaving the attacker in a passive and confused condition for several minutes. Still there is no significant effect on the heart and other organs.”As a general rule, a 1/4 second contact will repel and startle the attacker, giving intense pain and muscle contraction. One to two seconds will cause intense pain, muscle spasms and a dazed mental state, this may drop the attacker to the ground. Over three seconds will cause intense pain, loss of balance, loss of muscle control, mental confusion and disorientation. Generally any charge over three seconds will cause the aggressor to fall to the ground. The aggressor will be unable to recover for several minutes and effects may last for up to fifteen minutes.”13

Creation of “Multiple Personalities” and/or “Sleeper Agents”

“If you think creating Multiple Personality Disorder is too bizarre and strange to be real … again, you just have to look at the LSD, the brain implant research, some of the sensory deprivation, the Ames Leaf Room, using millions and millions of dollars to pay psychics to spy on other countries while lying on tables in the USA. Once you have that context, then creating Multiple Personality Disorder is kind of small …the very fact that you can create it artificially, to me indicates that it can be created artificially or on purpose, and also that it’s likely to happen naturally.”

As someone who is multiple myself, I don’t like to speak to the multiple issue. I’ll only note here that the vast majority of the psychiatric community is absolutely convinced that “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder” only occurs in situations of abuse, and some of them insist it must be extremely violent and particularly traumatic abuse.

Whether the government was able to successfully program people, either within multiple systems or otherwise, who could act as assassins, drug mules, et cetera, is another question. Let’s let the CIA themselves address that one. Most sources refer to this simply as a 1951 memo; one gives the “approximate date” as “January 1, 1952.” It is labeled Bluebird. However, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke overlapped, in some cases both being engaged in the same activity, and both were engaged in studying various methods and effects relating to hypnotismC; Project MKULTRA, of which I believe Monarch was a part, began as an offshoot of Project Artichoke. Therefore, I believe that the following illustrate at least some of what the CIA was trying to do and had achieved around the beginning of Project MKULTRA; we already know it was their stated intention to develop these findings further in MKULTRA/Monarch.

“1. Can we “condition” by post-H (hypnotic) suggestion agency employees (or persons of interest to this agency) to prevent them from giving information to any unauthorized source or for committing any act on behalf of a foreign or domestic enemy?”2. Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an H condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit? (Long range).
“3. Can we create by post-H control an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?
“4. Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two by post-H control have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? (Short, immediate activity)
“5. Can we by SI and H techniques force a subject (unwilling or otherwise) to travel long distances, commit specified acts and return to us or bring documents or materials? Can a person acting under post-H control successfully travel long distances?
“6. Can we use SI and H to combat fatigue, produce extreme mental effort?
“7. Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?
“8. Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?
“9. Can we design tests to determine whether or not an enemy agent has been conditioned by SI and H or any other method?
“10. Can we detect SI and H by use of SI and H (regression)?
“11. Can we make a ‘conditioned’ subject reveal by SI and H specifically how they were conditioned (drugs, torture, fatigue, hostage pressure, techniques)?
“12. Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?
“13. How long can we sustain a post-H suggestion-unaided-with reinforcement?
“14. What would be fastest way to induce SI and H conditions – with drugs – or without any mechanical aids?
“15. Can we devise a standard simple relatively fast technique for inducing SI and H conditions that can be used by untrained agents (with or without drugs)?
“16. Is it possible to find a gas that can be used to gain SI control from a gas pencil, odorless, colorless: one shot, etc.?
“17. What are full details on ’sleep-inducing machine’?
“18. How can sodium A or P or any other sleep inducing agent be best concealed in a normal or commonplace item, such as candy, cigarettes, liqueur, wines, coffee, tea, beer, gum, water, aspirin tablets, common medicines, coke, tooth paste?
“19. How effective can the ‘carotid artery technique’ be made? Can it be used while subject is unconscious? Is it faster than other techniques?
“20. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans? Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?
“21. Can we, while a subject is under SI and H control, show them a map and have them point out specific items, locations, etc., on the map? Can we also have them make detailed drawings, sketches, plans?
“Could any of the above be done under field conditions and in a very short space of time?”C and W

On January 7th, 1953, they reported that:

“These subjects have clearly demonstrated that they can pass from a fully awake state to a deep H (hypnotic) controlled state by telephone, by receiving written matter, or by the use of code, signal, or words, and that control of those hypnotized can be passed from one individual to another without great difficulty. It has also been shown by experimentation with these girls that they can act as unwilling couriers for information purposes.”W

And in 1954:

“Miss (whited out) was instructed (having expressed a fear of firearms) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken Miss (whited out) (now in a deep hypnotic sleep). Failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss (whited out). She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill’ (whited out) for failing to awaken. Miss (whited out) carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded) gun at (whited out) and then proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened. Miss (whited out) expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”W

Nazis

The claim of Nazi involvement in these atrocities usually seems to come not from survivors but from outsiders researching the issue and trying to explain how it all came about. For example, Ron Patton has written that

“After WWII, the U.S. Department of Defense secretly imported many of the top German Nazi and Italian Fascist scientists and spies into the United States via South America and the Vatican. The code name for this operation was Project PAPERCLIP. One of the more prominent finds for the U.S. was German General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence against Russia. Upon arriving in Washington D.C. in 1945, Gehlen met extensively with President Truman, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Allen Dulles, who would later become the stalwart head of the CIA. The objective of their brain-storming sessions was to reorganize the nominal American intelligence operation, transforming it into a highly-efficient covert organization. The culmination of their efforts produced the Central Intelligence Group in 1946, renamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947.”16

The clearest connection with the Nazis is through the above-mentioned Project Paperclip. As riverrun has written,

“….The Nazis had done some very “good” work in rocket science and psychological, chemical, and biological warfare. It seemed a pity to let that work disappear in a puff of petrol smoke in a ditch at Hitler’s Wedding Reception. “As early as the invasion of Normandy, in June of 1944, at least ten thousand American intelligence officers were charged with seizing Nazi experts in munitions, rocketry, and psychological, biological and chemical research. For good measure, French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis were included as well.
…. “(This project was) like giving Osama Bin Laden’s experts in suicide bombing an apartment in Alexandria and a Visa Card, so long as they promised to only suicide bomb for our side.”

So, however “crazy conspiracy theorist” it may sound to link these activities to the Nazis, they do seem to follow a clear line back to Nazi medical experiments and related research.

Disney

My first exposure to the idea of Project Monarch came when I met people who had been ritually abused and were trying to explore and defuse their own programming. I found a lot of information describing supposed Project Monarch programming — like Alice in Wonderland, color, gem, and spin programming — which nevertheless is also found in a lot of people who were ritually abused outside of the government’s grasp.
The two main kinds of programming can be described as operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the classic Pavlovian response. A dog salivates when it hears the can opener; a college student jumps at hearing the bell for recess; an abuse survivor has body memories of being unable to breathe at the sight of the exact shade of blue of the blanket in the bed where they were almost smothered. It’s a disparate response which comes from extremely intense or repeated stimuli. As Tem42 observes, it is a stimulus-stimulus connection instead of stimulus-response: they are all reacting as if both stimuli were present (the can opener and food, the bell and recess, the bedclothes and the smothering) instead of only the one which is triggering them.

Operant conditioning is a connection between some stimulus and its normal response. We flip a switch and discover that the overhead light turns on, and soon operant conditioning makes this an automatic motion for us. It is what happens when a rat learns what button to press to get fed, or when we make our way through a new piece of software for the first time and watch for consistent responses from it to find out what different commands and buttons do.

Most of the stereotypical programming within ritual abuse is classical conditioning. Using triggers that have seemingly irrelevant effects is a handy way for people to mask the programming and hide what they are doing. Who would believe that an (apparent?) assassin like Sirhan Sirhan was externally controlled and put into a dissociative fugue state by the Smurfs theme song? (This is an entirely fictional example. I believe Sirhan Sirhan was too early for at least the American Smurfs.)

Programming like this can be very involved. One book, movie, or fairytale can be exploited for a huge number of triggers and programs. Both the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are very often used for this, possibly because of their magical and sometimes surreal imagery and patterns as well as their prevalence in mainstream United States culture. But what does that mean?

Imagine you have a friend who you know has been struggling to deal with ritual abuse, to figure out what happened to her and what is going on. Maybe you’re good friends; maybe you trust each other fairly deeply. You might happen to know a particular number or pattern that she finds very triggering; maybe one afternoon you are talking, and you happen to say that triggering number. Maybe she asked you to try something like that, to see what would happen. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you do anyway.
She goes away, markedly. Someone else comes out; they seem little and scared. Maybe you’re used to this; you know she’s multiple, you’ve gotten to know different people in there. That’s okay. You ask her what her name is; it’s Alice17. You find out there are a lot more Alices in there; you realize she thinks you’re going to rape her, that that’s what she’s been taught that she’s there for. Maybe later you discover that 17 is important to them too, because it’s a prime factor of the number that was the big trigger. Whatever. You figure it’s probably because of Alice in Wonderland, because you know your friend is totally obsessed with that book, and any movies or anything else made from it. Maybe you’d heard about Alice in Wonderland programming somewhere already.

Alice freaks out and takes off, maybe even because you’re not doing anything to her. The unknown is hard. Someone else comes around, some sly pain-in-the-ass you’ve met before. They were hanging out there already, keeping an eye on things. They greet you and ask if you’re the White Rabbit. You’re pretty sure you’re not, whatever it is. Later you find out that that’s usually a programmer. They tell you a lot of stuff anyway, and you try to figure out how much of it is to mess with other people in there… things like getting them between two mirrors so they go “through the looking-glass,” or like little snatches of Lewis Carroll poems that do things, but not what they do. Maybe later you learn more, like that “through the looking-glass” means that someone else who was programmed and forced to be a child prostitute gets stuck out for a really long time, or that the poem they gave you makes whoever’s out lose everything in their short-term memory.

Maybe all of this seems totally fantastical to you; unfortunately, the little scene above was drawn straight from personal experience.
Some of the benefits of this kind of programming are:

The child is likely to encounter the movie, or references to it, in many innocent everyday situations, which reinforces the programming at no cost to the abuser. Nursery rhymes are also commonly used, presumably for similar reasons.

As we’ll see a little later on, combining extreme abuse with ludicrously different elements (such as alien abduction or Disney movies) is an easy way for the abusers to seriously damage their victims’ credibility.

It cuts down on the work for the programmer: It’s easy to remember elements that everyone knows from popular books or movies, and nobody has to create triggers from scratch. (Although when it comes to many cases of non-governmental ritual abuse, abusers are simply acting out their own abuse on others rather than embarking on some grand new scheme.)

This is not a claim specifically made about the CIA’s projects in most cases, although it is sometimes connected to abuse by the military. Other forms of programming, though, are rampant in the experiences of Project Monarch survivors.

There are still confusing aspects of these accounts, like the aforementioned and possibly drug-induced experience of seeing Bush reveal his true, humanoid lizard form — which I admit I would really like to believe! Let’s ask again….

Was There Something Specifically Called Project Monarch?

Phillips and O’Brien aren’t the only sources of these claims, obviously. This question brings us back to the beginning of this piece. That is, it can’t be asked sensibly without being split into the original two questions: Was there something specifically called Project Monarch? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

A Moment For the Skeptical

It certainly appears to be true that Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien have surrounded Project Monarch with a cloud of confusing and sometimes entertainingly odd information. Their explanations of what is involved seem almost designed to make it all seem ludicrous — and indeed, this is one of the tools used in ritual abuse and mind control-related abuse. There appear to me to be two real questions raised by such writings: Does a specific “Project Monarch” exist? And did the United States government commit atrocities like those attributed to Project Monarch — and if so, which and by whom?

In previous readings on Project Monarch, I had been fortunate enough not to come across O’Brien or Phillips’ controversial writings, nor even Martin Cannon’s article on the subject. In doing research for this writeup, I was especially careful not to use them as resources.

Evidence For Project Monarch As Such

Since Projects MKULTRA and Artichoke, among others, have been documented through information released by the CIA itselfA,B, we do know that the CIA has done extensive experimentation on civilians around the issues of programming, mind control, memory retention and erasure, the effects of various drugs, et cetera. I set out to look for information about Project Monarch in relation to these confirmed projects.

I did find a few sites that assert they have printed evidence that Project Monarch existed.y,z The basic information they give seems to be that MKULTRA was a large enterprise with 149 stated sub-projects – which can be confirmed by reading the information released by the CIAA,B – and that Project Monarch was a specific sub-project.

The first evidence I found was a listserv post which claimed that Project Monarch was Subproject 84 of MKULTRAz, but without having the released documents to look at, I can’t tell whether this is because it is called that in the text, or because of the content of Subproject 84. The subprojects of MKULTRA have titles ranging from “Marijuana Research” to “Unwitting Drug Tests at University of Maryland,” “Rapid Hypnotic Induction,” and “Optics mixed with Biological Warfare–Cuba Chapter.”A

The declassified folder of documents on Subproject 84 is apparently labeled “Hypnosis Work,” according to the list of documents which John Marks received (under the Freedom of Information Act) for his research on the book “The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”A This seems inconclusive to me; while the general description of the work involved in Project Monarch could fit under “Hypnosis Work,” it could just as easily fit under many of the other MKULTRA subprojects listed there.

There is also an article by Ron Patton wherein he states that

“The most incriminating statement to date made by a government official as to the possible existence of Project MONARCH was extracted by (historian and investigative reporter) Anton Chaitkin, a writer for the publication, The New Federalist. When former CIA Director William Colby was asked directly, “What about monarch?” he replied angrily and ambiguously, “We stopped that between the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s.”16

I don’t consider that to be very strong evidence, because I have not been able to find any primary source documents quoting William Colby, even the original Chaitkin article. It is interesting, if true, but hardly conclusive. After writing and posting this piece, however, I was approached by a casual acquaintance who I had forgotten was a ritual abuse survivor. I found out that she had the kind of programming frequently associated with Project Monarch, and that she had an online journal in which she had tried to replicate a form she had once seen with her name on it — a form which had been headed, “MONARCH/MKULTRA.”y I hope to get her permission to interview her for this writeup soon.

The Spin Doctors: Why Does It All Seem So Strange?

I know people personally, offline, who remember being ritually abused by the government in some of the ways described above, who have seen many of their experiences reflected in the writings of apparent Project Monarch survivors like Brice Taylor. As Timeshredder points out, Taylor’s accounts of Project Monarch appeared after O’Brien’s, although given the nature of linear time I feel bound to point out that someone’s accounts have to come first.

Martin Cannon, in his article on Phillips and O’Brien which forms the basis for the writeup above, addresses the issue of “which came first”:

“Just to make matters pluperfectly surreal: Mark Phillips has privately admitted to at least one researcher that he (Phillips) concocted the name ‘Project Monarch,’ just to see who would pick it up. At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited – which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a ‘Project Monarch’ well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario.”20

Cannon himself also states therein that “Little about the basic Monarch theory struck me as technically implausible – indeed, this putative project seems, in many ways, the logical extension of MKULTRA.” His conjecture seems to be that much of the information Mark Phillips has helped release on the subject was designed to cloud the issue. Combining survivor testimony with false information is one of the main tools used to cover up ritual abuse. For example, Pamela Hudson, LCSW and author of “Ritual Child Abuse: Discovery, Diagnosis and Treatment,”

“said it became apparent to her that perpetrators actually set up stagings for incidents of abuse. Perpetrators dressed as space aliens or cartoon characters, so that later when a child was questioned by a therapist, lawyer, or police officer, the child might say that the abuser was an alien or Mickey Mouse – and the whole story might be dismissed as fabrication.”14

Along the same lines, Martin Cannon (author of the article debunking Cathy O’Brien’s story) writes elsewhere, on the subject of alien abductions, that:

“I posit that the abductees HAVE been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy — or, more precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: The kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction is real. But the little grey men from Zeti Reticuli are NOT real; they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather, they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.”11

Kathleen Sullivan, among others, has spoken eloquently on the way this dynamic plays out and on some of the hidden repercussions for survivors who go public with their stories:

“…I am quite amused that Icke, who blatantly reinforces ‘lizard men’ screen memories in high-level MC survivors’ minds to discredit them to the public and in court, is suddenly helping to expose Mark. I’ve seen this behavior before. In this instance, former business partners (Gunderson, Icke, Phillips and Bowart/Kirby) suddenly turn on one of their own, AFTER it is obvious that their partner’s (sic) are not going to behave and be quiet about his activities. The others had years of warning from the victims, to step out and denounce him.”The way I see it, Mark became too much of a liability to them. This behavior on the part of Mark’s friends/partners is not dissimilar to when children go to the police and media about a group of criminal cultists who have been ritually traumatizing and raping them for years. The cultists throw out one of their people for the police and legal system to make an open fuss over and slap in prison, and the others continue doing their dirty work just like before, never being legally named.
“In the MC survivor community, I’ve seen this tactic taken one step further. ‘Good guy bad guy’ routine. By helping to publicly out their partner, after having been tight with him for many years, it makes other perps look like they are heros. (sic) Then the the (sic) outed perp’s victims (eg: Brice) go running to THEM for protection and information. And the survivor’s external control and victimization continues….”22

While it is difficult to know how to distinguish truth from programmed smokescreen in accounts like Cathy O’Brien’s, it is possible to look at the events that we can verify and begin to build a sort of mental filter for fact and torturous fiction. For example, one self-described “alleged survivor,” Carol Rutz, tells a story very like Cathy’s in structure and timeline, but much less lurid in problematic detail. She describes her

“intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of starting at the tender age of four. Through a series of FOIA’s to various departments of the government, I have amassed an incredible amount of material that validates my personal experiences. I have also found pictures of machines that were used in these experiments that match drawings I made during my healing process,”

all of which she also provides to her readers.1,4Now, I’m not saying Cathy O’Brien is lying or that nothing she describes has happened to her, only that she has been manipulatively exploited to make all of these issues seem more improbable than they really are. We can still learn a lot from what she has to say. As John Gentry points out,

“In the balance, Phillips and O’Brien have helped literally tens of thousands awaken to the ongoing designs of the New World Order, one world government bunch; and pointed repeatedly and poignantly to their (NWO) Achilles’ Heel: their treatment of women and children.”21

The programming, torture, child sexual abuse, and the rest of what is described by people like Cathy Phillips, are a form of ritual abuse. In these cases, it is sometimes called government ritual abuse or government-sponsored ritual abuse.

As we can see from Timeshredder’s writeup above, ritual abuse is highly controversial. Accounts of ritual abuse are frequently characterized by elements that seem too extreme to have happened to anyone, or even laughable — like seeing the President turn into a giant lizard.
Nevertheless, there is a wealth of government-released evidence for the former, and a variety of possible explanations for the latter, especially given that a great deal of the government’s admitted experimentation involved heavy hallucinogens and other drugs administered without the survivor’s knowledge or permission.

Beyond Project Monarch: A few other cases of governmental ritual abuse

Of course, it’s easy to glibly say that there are explanations and evidence for these things. It’s harder to find them. For example, while there are Freedom of Information Act-released documents on a lot of the horrific acts committed by the CIA under MKULTRA, they represent only a small portion of the original documentation. According to Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, in his prepared statement to the 1977 U.S. Senate Committee HearingsD,

Most of what was known about the Agency’s involvement with behavioral drugs during the investigations in 1975 was contained in a report on Project MKULTRA prepared by the Inspector General’s office in 1963…. The MKULTRA-related report was made available to the Church Committee investigators and to the staff of Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Health. Until the recent discovery, it was believed that all of the MKULTRA files dealing with behavioral modification had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of the then retiring Chief of the Office of Technical Service, with the authorization of the DCI, as has been previously reported.

Searching for clear information on government ritual abuse often requires sifting through a lot of conflicting and confusing information from both sides. A lot of writing on this subject, whether it is denying or supporting these claims, reads like the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap — “CIA, 1939, after Nazis & Commies united, proposed spacebombs that destroy all, unless we finally teach the Moral ABC’s the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus to unite in All-One-God-Faith. Illuminati-Masons-Nazis-White House! Government propaganda destroys! Killing machine secrets for all! ‘WE’RE ALL ONE OR NONE!’”

With enough effort and knowledge, though, clear information can be found, even on….

The Major Claims

While many of the claims made about Project Monarch seem extreme and sometimes even impossible to the casual observer, they often fit in easily with the work that the CIA has admitted to doing in other projects and in MKULTRA itself. The CIA has already admitted to extreme, extensive experiments in mind control, programming, and torture. For example:

According to Dr. Colin Ross, who wrote a long and heavily researched and well-footnoted book about all the declassified information on MKULTRA7, “The deliberate creation of multiple personality in children is an explicitly stated plan in the MKULTRA Subproject Proposal submitted for funding on May 30, 1961.”E (This was Subproject 136, which according to the CIA involved electric shocks and “hypnotically induced anxieties,” among other forms of trauma.) Other MKULTRA experiments they list involved testing mustard gas and other chemical warfare agents on human subjects, biological weapons testing, physical pain endurance and brainwashing techniques.

Files on MKULTRA Subproject 49, labeled “MKULTRA: George White and Federal Bureau of Narcotics” when released under the Freedom of Information Act, included “Experiment 7 – Recall of hypnotically acquired information by very specific signals.”1 This is programming: specifically-chosen signals that bring up “acquired information.” (Usually that means orders to do something; sometimes it means fear or traumatic memories.)”Hypnosis” in the CIA files seems to have been a broad category: their proposal for Subproject 136 says in part that “In other cases drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociative states, from the abaissment de niveau mental to multiple personality in so-called mediums, and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.”

CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner’s testimony to the 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRAd included, in very small part, the following information:

“The 1963 Inspector General report on MKULTRA made available to both the Church Committee and Senator Kennedy’s Subcommittee mentions electro-shock and harassment substances (pp. 4, 16); covert testing on unwitting U.S. citizens (pp. 7, 10-12); the search for new materials through arrangements with specialists in universities, pharmaceutical houses, hospitals, state and federal institutions, and private research organizations (pp. 7, 9); and the fact that the Technical Service Division of CIA had initiated 144 subprojects related to the control of human behavior between 1953-1963 (p. 21).”D

MKULTRA and other CIA projects also involved nonconsensual radiation testing on unsuspecting citizens, often in conjunction with other government departments.

“…the DOE has disclosed information about the federal government’s human radiation experiments after World War II. These experiments primarily took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, but some have occurred as recently as the 1980s. Eleven thousand documents reviewed disclosed that in at least forty-eight experiments humans were given radioactive isotopes, generally without their consent, to determine the effects of radiation on the body. The DOE has made thousands of documents once kept secret available for public use. Of primary interest to the public was O’Leary’s announcement in December 1993 that documents related to human radiation experiments and exposure to barium and strontium at government weapons laboratories across the country were to be released.”10

(This is according to a biography of Hazel O’Leary, the first woman to become U.S. Secretary of Energy, which cites the Nashville Tennessean for this information10. More information about these experiments can be found on the Department of Energy’s own websiteF.)

Ross also states that “Although MKULTRA has received the most public attention of any of the CIA and military mind control programs, most of its Subprojects were relatively benign compared to experiments carried out in PROJECT OFTEN and MKNAOMI.” MKNAOMI was a successor of MKULTRA, focusing on biological and chemical weapons. The CIA and DIA collaborated on creating and testing these agents. According to the Military Review in November 1970, the United States begins to research “ethnic weapons,”H intended to “target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.”7 MKNAOMI also includes a military project seeking to develop cancer-causing viruses. According to the Congressional Record of 1969, the Department of Defense requested funding “to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired,”8,9 and against which natural immunological processes and medicines would not work. Much of this research takes place at Fort Detrick’s Center for Biological Warfare Research. Under President Nixon, the center is converted to become the National Cancer Institute’s Frederick Cancer Research and Development, while this project is going on (in 1971)G. In 1979 scientist Robert Gallo of NCI finally isolates a virus to which no natural immunity exists, naming it HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus)G. Later, HTLV-III is renamed HIV.8

But I digress.

Any one of these examples should satisfy anyone seeking a good “conspiracy theory,” and I have limited myself here to only a few of the statements and examples which I can back up solely through United States government documentation. More information on the kind of behavior that constitutes ritual abuse can be found at that node.
So, looking at our general claims:

Have the CIA run mind-control experiments? According to them, yes.

Have at least some of these experiments involve intense programming and torture? Again, according to them, yes.

Have any of these experiments attempted to create an artificially-induced form of multiple personalities/dissociative identity disorder? Once again, yes, and in so many words.

Conclusion

Even if Mark Phillips had invented the name “Project Monarch” himself, I believe that would mean nothing about whether this kind of abuse took place. We know that there have been many different projects in the CIA alone which perpetrated similar forms of abuse. It is possible that there was not a specific “Project Monarch,” but that most of what is described by “Project Monarch survivors” did happen to them. It is hardly the only government project which is supposed to have extensively abused people. In fact, many of the people I know personally who have experienced similar abuse to that of Taylor and O’Brien do not identify as having been part of Project Monarch or any other specific government project.

When I began writing this piece, that was all that I thought had happened: that even if there was no “Project Monarch,” it would simply have meant that someone gave these experiences a handy label; and that in the absence of more extensive information about government abuse, a lot of people assumed that they were a part of “Project Monarch” because it was the name most often associated with the kind of experiences that they knew they had. Now I believe that Monarch is probably an official name for some part of MKULTRA. For me, the turning point came from talking to people who had been abused in these ways, who had seen CIA paperwork with the word “Monarch” right on it. Your mileage may vary.
However, I believe that the core issue here is that these survivors’ experiences are thrown out, even laughed at, while this kind of abuse goes on all around us. I hope that the extensive research I have done here can help spread awareness of at least one tiny part of this abuse. Thanks for reading.

Works Cited:

Please note that some of these sites are wildly biased in one direction or another, and that in all cases the reference is to specific documents reprinted on the site, not to any commentary that the site’s owners may have included.Documentation:
(Primary source documentation, mostly from United States government agencies; I highly recommend reading any and all of these documents.)

Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

Alice in Wonderland fans have been marking the 150th anniversary of the fateful boat trip that saw the genesis of the children’s tale. But why do so many see adult themes in the story, asks Sophie Robehmed.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is, on one level at least, the story of a girl who disappears down a rabbit hole to a fantastic place full of bizarre adventures.

Charles Dodgson, a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, first told his surreal story to the daughters of dean Henry Liddell as they rowed down the Thames.

After the boating trip, 10-year-old Alice Liddell badgered Dodgson to write it down and Alice in Wonderland – under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll – was born. The heroine follows a talking white rabbit, meets the Queen of Hearts and plays croquet using flamingos as mallets.

Since the 1960s there has been a trend for readers to identify an underlying drug theme in the book.

The Cheshire Cat disappears leaving only the enigmatic grin behind. Alice drinks potions and eats pieces of mushroom to change her physical state. The caterpillar smokes an elaborate water pipe. The whole atmosphere of the story is so profoundly disjointed from reality – surely drugs must have had an influence? After all this was the era of legal opium use.

“When the men on the chessboard get up / And tell you where to go / And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom / And your mind is moving low / Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.”

The Matrix provides a film reference point. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The drug link is a homespun thing. You’ll find it on a host of random forums.

But the experts are usually sceptical. Carroll wasn’t thought to have been a recreational user of opium or laudanum, and the references may say more about the people making them than the author.

“The notion that the surreal aspects of the text are the consequence of drug-fuelled dreams resonates with a culture, particularly perhaps in the 60s, 70s and 80s when LSD was widely-circulated and even now where recreational drugs are commonplace,” says Dr Heather Worthington, Children’s Literature lecturer at Cardiff University.

Surreal scenes from the original text have made it into popular culture

“It is the deviant aspects that continue to fascinate because the text is unusual, innovative, and hard to grasp so turning to the author offers simplicity and excitement simultaneously.”

The mushroom is “magic” only in the context of the story. And the caterpillar is merely smoking tobacco through a hookah.

The shadow hanging over anyone reading the story is the issue of Carroll’s sexuality. A successful photographer, many of his surviving shots are of children, often semi-dressed or naked.

To many modern minds, a man who regularly formed friendships with young girls is inherently suspicious.

“Lewis Carroll’s personal life intrigues adult readers because Alice in Wonderland is a text for children but the notion that the author photographed, however innocently, young girls in a state of undress is, to our modern eyes, unpalatable,” says Worthington.

“That Alice was based on a child that Carroll knew adds yet another layer of interest, or suspicion, depending on how you look at it.”

But Carroll was living at a time when childhood innocence was being forged, influencing how children were represented in 19th Century literature aimed at them.

Carroll’s interest in young female innocence is explained by some of the experts as one that invoked desire, but not necessarily sexual.

Alice Liddell, photographed as “the beggarmaid” by Lewis Carroll

Jenny Woolf, author of The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, agrees with this theory.

“Girls offered him a non-judgemental and non-sexual female audience and he opened up to them. They loved him and he found it a relief to be with them.

“Although he was attracted to women, celibacy was a condition of Carroll’s job [a condition imposed on certain Oxford academics at the time] and he believed that having sex was against God’s wishes for him.”

There are plenty of experts who find his interests harder to explain and it is inevitable that this knowledge will inform what readers take from the story.

Consult any set of notes on the book and you’ll see a slew of themes picked out: puberty, abandonment, the challenge of transition to adulthood, even the perils of authoritarian justice in the form of the Queen of Hearts.

But bearing in mind the nature of the birth of the piece, an off-the-cuff attempt to amuse a child in a rowboat, are people guilty of reading too much into it?

In a recent issue of Prospect magazine, Richard Jenkyns, professor of the classical tradition at Oxford University, called Alice in Wonderland “probably the most purely child-centred book ever written” and said that its only purpose “is to give pleasure”.

Yet another narrative imposed on the book is the idea of grappling with a sense of self. Carroll led a very controlled existence, struggling with self-identity, a recurring theme in the book as Alice regularly expresses uncertainty about who she is after she enters Wonderland.

“Perhaps that’s why his book refers to ‘morality’ in jeering terms,” suggests Woolf. “And the action takes place either underground or in a world which is the opposite of our own.”

We can’t ever truly know what Carroll intended or if he meant to write anything beyond an enchanting children’s story.

Based on his own experience as an illustrator for the 1988 edition of Alice in Wonderland, Anthony Browne believes Carroll might not have been aware of the meanings found within his story.

“People interpret books in a logical way as they do dreams. They want it to have meaning. Alice in Wonderland is not to be read as a logical book. There could be some hidden meanings in there, especially considering Carroll was a mathematician during his lifetime, whether he was aware of such meanings subconsciously or not.”

Ultimately, perhaps it’s more enjoyable for the full intentions of the author to remain unknown during the reading of the book.

“In a way, it doesn’t matter,” says Browne. “I don’t think Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland to be interpreted. He wrote it to entertain.”

Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

Alice in Wonderland fans have been marking the 150th anniversary of the fateful boat trip that saw the genesis of the children’s tale. But why do so many see adult themes in the story, asks Sophie Robehmed.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is, on one level at least, the story of a girl who disappears down a rabbit hole to a fantastic place full of bizarre adventures.

Charles Dodgson, a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, first told his surreal story to the daughters of dean Henry Liddell as they rowed down the Thames.

After the boating trip, 10-year-old Alice Liddell badgered Dodgson to write it down and Alice in Wonderland – under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll – was born. The heroine follows a talking white rabbit, meets the Queen of Hearts and plays croquet using flamingos as mallets.

Since the 1960s there has been a trend for readers to identify an underlying drug theme in the book.

The Cheshire Cat disappears leaving only the enigmatic grin behind. Alice drinks potions and eats pieces of mushroom to change her physical state. The caterpillar smokes an elaborate water pipe. The whole atmosphere of the story is so profoundly disjointed from reality – surely drugs must have had an influence? After all this was the era of legal opium use.

“When the men on the chessboard get up / And tell you where to go / And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom / And your mind is moving low / Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.”

The Matrix provides a film reference point. “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The drug link is a homespun thing. You’ll find it on a host of random forums.

But the experts are usually sceptical. Carroll wasn’t thought to have been a recreational user of opium or laudanum, and the references may say more about the people making them than the author.

“The notion that the surreal aspects of the text are the consequence of drug-fuelled dreams resonates with a culture, particularly perhaps in the 60s, 70s and 80s when LSD was widely-circulated and even now where recreational drugs are commonplace,” says Dr Heather Worthington, Children’s Literature lecturer at Cardiff University.

Surreal scenes from the original text have made it into popular culture

“It is the deviant aspects that continue to fascinate because the text is unusual, innovative, and hard to grasp so turning to the author offers simplicity and excitement simultaneously.”

The mushroom is “magic” only in the context of the story. And the caterpillar is merely smoking tobacco through a hookah.

The shadow hanging over anyone reading the story is the issue of Carroll’s sexuality. A successful photographer, many of his surviving shots are of children, often semi-dressed or naked.

To many modern minds, a man who regularly formed friendships with young girls is inherently suspicious.

“Lewis Carroll’s personal life intrigues adult readers because Alice in Wonderland is a text for children but the notion that the author photographed, however innocently, young girls in a state of undress is, to our modern eyes, unpalatable,” says Worthington.

“That Alice was based on a child that Carroll knew adds yet another layer of interest, or suspicion, depending on how you look at it.”

But Carroll was living at a time when childhood innocence was being forged, influencing how children were represented in 19th Century literature aimed at them.

Carroll’s interest in young female innocence is explained by some of the experts as one that invoked desire, but not necessarily sexual.

Alice Liddell, photographed as “the beggarmaid” by Lewis Carroll

Jenny Woolf, author of The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, agrees with this theory.

“Girls offered him a non-judgemental and non-sexual female audience and he opened up to them. They loved him and he found it a relief to be with them.

“Although he was attracted to women, celibacy was a condition of Carroll’s job [a condition imposed on certain Oxford academics at the time] and he believed that having sex was against God’s wishes for him.”

There are plenty of experts who find his interests harder to explain and it is inevitable that this knowledge will inform what readers take from the story.

Consult any set of notes on the book and you’ll see a slew of themes picked out: puberty, abandonment, the challenge of transition to adulthood, even the perils of authoritarian justice in the form of the Queen of Hearts.

But bearing in mind the nature of the birth of the piece, an off-the-cuff attempt to amuse a child in a rowboat, are people guilty of reading too much into it?

In a recent issue of Prospect magazine, Richard Jenkyns, professor of the classical tradition at Oxford University, called Alice in Wonderland “probably the most purely child-centred book ever written” and said that its only purpose “is to give pleasure”.

Yet another narrative imposed on the book is the idea of grappling with a sense of self. Carroll led a very controlled existence, struggling with self-identity, a recurring theme in the book as Alice regularly expresses uncertainty about who she is after she enters Wonderland.

“Perhaps that’s why his book refers to ‘morality’ in jeering terms,” suggests Woolf. “And the action takes place either underground or in a world which is the opposite of our own.”

We can’t ever truly know what Carroll intended or if he meant to write anything beyond an enchanting children’s story.

Based on his own experience as an illustrator for the 1988 edition of Alice in Wonderland, Anthony Browne believes Carroll might not have been aware of the meanings found within his story.

“People interpret books in a logical way as they do dreams. They want it to have meaning. Alice in Wonderland is not to be read as a logical book. There could be some hidden meanings in there, especially considering Carroll was a mathematician during his lifetime, whether he was aware of such meanings subconsciously or not.”

Ultimately, perhaps it’s more enjoyable for the full intentions of the author to remain unknown during the reading of the book.

“In a way, it doesn’t matter,” says Browne. “I don’t think Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland to be interpreted. He wrote it to entertain.”

Is Neal Rauhauser an Informant?

Neal Rauhauser

Neal Rauhauser, the Iowa native who came to prominence with his involvement in various online trolling efforts like the Beandog Milita, Twittergate, and Vile Tweets, has interesting associations. Other sites, such as the Crying Wolfe Blog and Ron Brynaert’s site, have publicized these associations in the past. However, the media still has yet to take note.

As part of my continuing series on Neal Rauhauser and his involvement with various online hijinks, pranks, and slander campaigns, I’ve gone back into Neal’s life as a Graettinger, IA native and former resident of Omaha, NE. I’ve dug up two past marriages, and contacted various people in Neal’s past for phone interviews. And then there are the people whose lives have been affected by Neal over the past two years, people like blogger Mike Stack of New Jersey, who figured prominently in the revelation of Anthony Weiner’s online tweets to porn stars and college aged coeds, including an infamous picture of his erection.

The story broke nationally through Andrew Breitbart, but Mike and his friend Dan Wolfe otherwise known as PatriotUSA76 broke the story with tweets. There is some dispute about how about they agreed to tweet, with Mike Stack saying that he was sent an email by PatriotUSA76 that clued him into a brewing sex scandal involving Congressman Weiner. Mike Stack alleges that Dan Wolfe contacted him about Weiner after Stack left a comment about his Twitter avatar. Wolfe pressed Stack to tweet the initial message related to Weiner’s then rumored sex scandal, and said that he would re-tweet. Stack did so.

What happened afterwards was simple enough: Mike Stack took the blame, and Dan Wolfe maintained his anonymity and disappeared. And what a heavy blame it was: today, photos of Mike along with his arrest report from 2004 have been posted online, and he’s been alleged to have framed Anthony Weiner by hacking his account. Mike vehemently denies doing so. However, his denials didn’t register with the left wing tweeters who bombarded him with threatening tweets and emails. They outed his address, photos of his home, and his work as a porn site moderator. Additionally, the 2004 case against Mike Stack was dropped.

But that’s all been covered by othersites, and what’s interesting to me is how Mike Stack managed to haul Neal into court by serving process on an attorney by the name of Mark Rasch. Mark Rasch, for those of you who do not know, was the general counsel for the online vigilante effort that called itself Project Vigilant. Project Vigilant was a loose conglomeration of hackers and infosec specialists that made waves when its founder, one Chet Uber, marched into Defcon to announce its existence and boast about the role Project Vigilant had in getting Pfc. Bradley Manning arrested.

Moreover, Mark Rasch is an attorney whose Washington, D.C. location just so happens to be in the same building with Baker & Hostetler, LLP, which happens to the same firm retained by Representative Weiner to investigate his possible hacked Twitter account. Representative Weiner later admitted to his guilt, of course, but this did not stop some on the left from continuing to posit that he was set up. It’s hard to see how one can set a man up and make him tweet a photo of his erection to a woman on the other side of the country, but there are those who insist on believing in a grand conspiracy in the Weiner scandal that involved nefarious right wing bloggers.

Poulsen & Lamo

Rasch is also the former Department of Justice attorney who investigated Wired magazine’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen for crime including mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Facing seven counts, Poulsen received a mere 51 months in prison. And when he emerged from prison, where did he wind up shortly afterwards? Security Focus, a publication that focused on security issues related to the Internet, a publication that just so happened to employ Mark Rasch. What’s stranger still is that Kevin Poulsen is now the Senior Editor at Wired, where he works with, you guessed it, Mark Rasch.

And what of Chet Uber, the Omaha resident who relocated to Florida and began accepting disability checks related to his diabetes and heart problems? He founded Project Vigilant, a consortium of hackers and infosec experts that monitored 12 regional ISPs and turned over their findings to various government agencies. Interestingly enough, while Project Vigilant’s members insist they did not violate the law, one wonders why there is a need for Project Vigilant when the NSA has the capacity to monitor every bit of electronic communication throughout the world.

What’s more, how does a man like Chet Uber get the money to found an organization like Project Vigilant, and how does he afford airfare to Defcon on disability checks that by his own account provide him less than $800 a month in income? Here is Neal’s explanation, from his post as Stranded Wind on Firedog Lake:

“I get periodic requests for help with network infrastructure problems, I had one come during the summer of 2009 that needed some special skills, and Chet answered some questions for me. It was a day’s work – $1,000 billed, and I had my customer make the check to BBHC Global so the company could afford to incorporate.

So that’s all there really is to it – a bunch of civic minded professionals who see each other at conferences, one of them on disability but wanting to volunteer so he could do something useful with his time, and one old friend repaying a debt to another by writing off a day’s consulting pay in hopes some good would come of it.“

Chet Uber

According to Neal, he paid the incorporation costs for the company that financed Project Vigilant’s emergence in the summer of 2009 by having his customer make out a $1000 check to BBHC Global. Neal subsequently deleted his explanation of BBHC Global’s genesis, but his fellow Firedoglake member shekissesfrogs had it saved in her cache and reposted it. What’s more interesting is how Neal had the time and energy to work a day and make $1000, but he didn’t use that money to pay off his child support obligations. At over $30,000 in the present day, Neal hasn’t paid child support in a while. At $675 a month, it’s easy to compute his financial obligations to his children as stretching back to 2009.

His insistence that he didn’t have the money because he could work is belied by his own version of events as to the rise of Project Vigilance and BBHC Global. He paid the incorporation costs of BBHC Global with his work on a company’s network infrastructure! But it goes much further, as the following quote from Neal’s Firedoglake post explaining how Project Vigilant came to be funded indicates:

“I hadn’t heard from Chet in quite a while. He’d had a massive heart attack in 2005, I got Lyme in 2007, and both of us were in pretty sad shape. I’d gone back to work at the beginning of the year and for a while my credit card was attached to his Walgreens account, covering meds he otherwise would not have been able to afford.

We started talking again, every week or so. A couple of times I logged in and paid his cell bill. He’d managed to hang on to a laptop through heart attack, losing a long term relationship, losing a business, and bouncing between friends and relatives. He finally qualified for disability and things started to get easier.“

Neal had money to help pay for Chet’s medications and even his cell phone bill, but he didn’t pay the child support he owes for his children. Despite insisting repeatedly to his ex-wife Nancy that he didn’t have the money because of his Lyme Disease, by Neal’s own account on Firedoglake he was working in the summer of 2009 and making enough money to pay for Chet Uber’s medications and his cell phone bill!

Project Vigilant is a largely extraneous and even redundant group, given what we know about the NSA’s capabilities, but the NSA, like other federal agencies, is occasionally constrained by obstacles like the law and procedural requirements. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where Project Vigilant becomes useful. You have people like Neal Rauhauser, a man who allegedly hacked the computer of his ex-wife to be vindictive, working to penetrate 12 regional ISPs and monitor the information and behavior of their customers for the purposes of turning over that information to various federal agencies. Neal has faced charges of criminal harassment from Mike Stack, the aforementioned New Jersey blogger who accused Neal of online harassment.

You have Neal’s associates, like the various members of the Beandogs, represented by Neal to me in our communications last year as hackers. We know that one of those Beandogs, Sam Birbeck aka Methadonna, went on to infamy for his role in accusing HOPE: Preventing Euthanasia & Assisted Suicide director Paul Russell of retaining him for the purposes of rigging an online poll. Birbeck sent emails saying that he would triple the agreed upon fee for his services. Trouble was, Paul Russell never retained Sam Birbeck for any job at all.

Sam Birbeck/Methadonna

But the supporters of the euthanasia bill in South Australia seized on the emails as proof of Russell’s gaming of the polls that showed citizens overwhelmingly opposing the euthanasia bill. One of the bill’s supporters, a transexual gynecologist named Dr. Rosemary Jones, forwarded an email from another euthanasia advocate named Mark Lawrence which stated the following:

“Friends, from what I hear, they (the Canadian based colation [sic], with teh [sic] NCC SA as its Ausralian [sic] base) are paying small amounts of PayPal money to US gamers to rig these polls all over the world, 24/7- how very principled. That’s how they got a 75/25 result on Adelaide Now on Tuesday, and, given that it is so obvious, why Adelaide Now at one point on Tuesday evening actually reduced the number of aggregate votes recorded. Good old NCC. Mark.”

Isn’t that a nice accusation, and isn’t it consistent with the loser’s limp and whining of Neal Rauhauser and other supporters of disgraced Representative Anthony Weiner? Neal and his allies insist that Weiner was hacked, and that he didn’t tweet the photo of his genitalia, even though Anthony Weiner accepted full responsibility for all of the tweets during his final his press conference.

And what we know of Brett Warren, aka @solaar of Maitland, FL, is that he too was linked to a robocalling operation in Canada in which he posed as Conservative Party aide Michael Sona to confess to Sona’s involvement in the robocalling effort which led Canadian voters to believe that their polling places had been moved! What are the odds that two known online associates of Neal Rauhauser would be involved in such tricks as they related to the political processes of two countries?

Just look at what Neal posted in his recollection of Project Vigilant’s beginnings:

“We’d been into infosec stuff ever since we’d met, him (Chet Uber) much more than me, but this was the first time I heard the name Project Vigilant applied to his broad collection of associates. He began organizing with a will, herding infosec rock stars into formation, then pulling in those who wanted to learn. The names of those willing to be seen in public were detailed in the second Albertson column.“

Did any of those who wanted to learn happen to be Beandogs or any of the other assorted trolls Neal was consorting with on Twitter during 2010 and early 2011? Did Project Vigilant serve not merely as a means to surreptitiously make an end-run around legal restrictions on government monitoring of ISPs, but also a means of training the Beandogs and other like-minded partisan individuals in the skill sets necessary to perform the dirty tricks directed at conservative bloggers and libertarian tweeters we’ve seen over the past two years?

Or was it something even more nefarious, such as a shell game to provide a convenient narrative to cover for how the government came to be aware of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s leak of classified diplomatic cables to Wikileaks? What we know of Pfc. Manning’s actions is simple enough: he isn’t charged with leaking the cables online to Wikileaks. The government contends that he made a physical drop of disks to Wikileaks allies in the Boston area. Why, then, would he communicate with the likes of a convicted hacker like Adrian Lamo, who in turn notified none other than Project Vigilant founder Chet Uber, who then notified Washington, D.C. attorney Mark Rasch, the man whose criminal investigation of Kevin Poulsen led to his conviction on seven criminal counts for which Poulsen received a surprisingly light sentence.

When you consider that before Adrian Lamo was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital three weeks before he supposedly began communicating with Pfc. Manning, you begin to understand that something isn’t quite right. The government’s chief witness against Bradley Manning is a man who has contradicted himself in numerous media interviews, and the main organization that helped bust Bradley Manning wasn’t the NSA or any other U.S. intelligence agency, but was instead a group of infosec folks and hackers operating under the direction of a disabled man by the name of Chet Uber, who had to rely on Neal Rauhauser for his prescriptions, his cell phone bill, and the money to incorporate the company that served as the funding conduit for Project Vigilant.

And nowhere in BBHC Global’s information is Neal Rauhauser listed as principal or even a member, even though he purportedly provided the startup money for BBHC Global. Instead, the owner of the BBHC Global domain name is one Steve Ruhe, who provides an interesting email: chet.uber@mac.com. Steve Ruhe is a drywall contractor named R&R Drywall in Lincoln, NE. Think of it: a drywall contractor who got into the information security business and registered BBHC Global’s domain name under Chet Uber’s mac.com account. It strains credulity, especially when you consider that the domain name wasn’t registered until April 2009. The significance of this is tremendous, because we know from Wired Magazine’s own reporting that Manning had been going through the classified information for months when he came across the infamous helicopter video in late 2009.

What if Project Vigilant and BBHC Global were merely shell organizations set up as part of a sophisticated operation to smoke out Bradley Manning? And what if Bradley Manning’s relationship with Adrian Lamo stemmed not from his leaking operation, but from his sexual orientation? Adrian Lamo was a volunteer at PlanetOut during the mid-1990s. PlanetOut is a gay and lesbian media firm. And given that Neal Rauhauser, the self-professed “old hacker” alleges that he fronted BBHC Global the money to incorporate with the proceeds from one of his jobs in the summer of 2009, what was his role in accumulating intelligence on the Manning leaks, if he had any role at all? And now that he is actively soliciting Anonymous and Lulzsec members and stirring up people at Occupy Wall Street, is he doing so in his capacity as a progressive activist or is he merely an informant passing on the information he accrues on social networks and IRCs to the federal government? Surely the members of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous would look at Neal’s solicitous attitude quite differently if they were aware of his affiliation with Project Vigilance, its cooperation with the FBI and other various federal agencies, and the boast of its founder Chet Uber that his organization helped bust Bradley Manning.

What we know about Neal is that he is a self-professed Infragard member who has meetings with the FBI on occasion, and on May 30, 2011 Neal made the following claim on his blog:

“OK, kids, in addition to being a mouthy blogger I’m also an Infragard member and my day job gets me occasional meetings with the FBI. I just called the agent for my district who covers cybercrime and we need to get this muddle distilled down for him.“

From what we know of the federal government and its history as it relates to movements like Occupy Wall Street, the anti-war movement during Vietnam, and the civil rights movement, planting people like Neal in those movements is not such a stretch. COINTELPRO, anyone? And given Neal’s documented and notorious trolling of the Tea Party, and his repeated threats to refer various Tea Party supporters on Twitter to federal law enforcement, was his trolling an attempt at entrapment to provokeTea Party supporters on Twitter to engage in possibly illegal and threatening conduct with their reactions?

Considering that members of the Wrecking Crew like Jeannie McBride, who would later be outed as a registered Democrat, went on infamy for their cooperation with Neal Rauhauser, it would seem that Neal’s operations were a good bit more than an effort to control the partisan narrative on social networks. After all, how does the FBI allow a man with documented psychiatric issues like Neal Rauhauser to work even peripherally for a quasi-governmental initiative like Project Vigilance? For that matter, given that their chief witness against Bradley Manning is Adrian Lamo, a man who was hospitalized for psychiatric issues three weeks before he came forward against Bradley Manning, things don’t add up.

And considering that serving process for Neal in a criminal harassment case on Mark Rasch resulted in Neal showing up with Brett Kimberlin to Municipal Court, what is Velvet Revolution’s role in Neal’s possible activities as an infiltrator and informant? We know that Velvet Revolution’s financials are sparse, with little detail on how they’ve spent their substantial donations. All we see of Velvet Revolution’s expenditures are the various websites like Indict Breitbart and the alleged retaining of Neal Rauhauser to work on various tasks. Is Velvet Revolution paying Neal Rauhauser, and if so, what services does Neal provide? Are they appropriate for a registered non-profit with tax-exempt status?

And has the federal government paid Neal for services rendered in his capacities with Project Vigilant and Infragard, and if so, why hasn’t Neal made an effort to address his financial obligations in Nebraska and Iowa? Again, given the prior history of the federal government and the animus it has displayed toward alternative political movements like the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and hacking organizations like Anonymous, LulzSec, and Wikileaks, it makes perfect sense to set a man with Neal’s psychological and character defects loose in Zuccotti Park and on Twitter, where he can entice and provoke individuals into incriminating behavior that would compromise and discredit them and the movements they affiliate with.
For all of the questions related to Neal’s involvement with Project Vigilant, Infragard, and his interaction with the federal government and his association with a former Department of Justice attorney whose protege and client have central positions in the Manning leaks and prosecution, one thing is very clear: those who are a part of Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous, and LulzSec, along with anyone in the Tea Party, should be very careful about what they say or divulge to Neal Rauhauser.

Author’s Note: The reporting of Ron Brynaert, Crying Wolf Blog, The Other McCain, Liberty Chick, and various other bloggers and websites deserves to be credited for the extensive documentation of Neal’s back history over the past two years. Also, thanks to Brooks Bayne and his site The Trenches for their continuing dedication to this story. To all of you who have read this series, thanks to you. There is so much more to come in the days and weeks ahead. To Mike Stack, I owe you a debt of gratitude for the emails you sent. It was like God dropped confirmation in my lap as to one of my theories.